


Triptych

by deathmallow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Canon Compliant, District Four, Epilogue, F/M, Family of Choice, Gen, Holiday Exchange, Mockingjay Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 16:28:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathmallow/pseuds/deathmallow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Triptych (noun): a set of three separate works that join together as one complete piece</i>
</p><p>At war's end, for Annie, Haymitch, and Johanna, "victory" means counting the costs and trying to find a way to carry on.  Because there are no winners, only survivors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Triptych

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marblesharp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marblesharp/gifts).



> For **marblesharp** , requesting the following prompt: _Haymitch+Johanna+Annie: Because maybe Haymitch does leave Twelve one day. What's a better place to go to than Four? There's water and two of his only friends left and sand and a chance to start again. And fish._
> 
> I kind of went nuts with the prompt and started it way back during Mockingjay. Sorry.
> 
> Many thanks to sabaceanbabe for the beta! 
> 
> Trigger warnings for offscreen char death, non-explicit sexual content, and allusions to sexual slavery, torture, and chemical addiction.

The pain of the fever was unsupportable, fire erupting and flowing through the core of Haymitch’s very bones like the hellishly glowing lava that had spewed from the volcano in his arena. Shaking, muscles cramping in rough shuddering spasms, feeling the cold slime of his own sweat on his skin, he reached again for the pail that was close to overflowing. Hopefully he got it all in the bucket, but it was hard to tell. It was a wonder there was anything left in his stomach at all. He’d long since passed the point of tasting thin, acid bile at the back of his throat when he puked.

He had so many dead and they all came to call, staring at him with empty sunken eyes in grey decaying flesh. His ma, Ash, Briar, Maysilee, the kids he killed in the Quell, all the dead Twelve tributes, the dead victors from this last arena. They came, and they judged him. They didn’t even have to say a thing. Just standing there looking at him, he and the ghosts both knew exactly why they’d died—Haymitch had fucked up and failed.

Sometimes the mutts were there again, and butterflies were stinging him or golden squirrels were chewing off his flesh. 

He’d had a few lucid moments when they first threw him in here, shortly after arriving in Thirteen, when he’d first started the shakes. An “isolation cell”—it was a hard cot with a rough grey blanket, the bucket because he couldn’t make it to the toilet now to puke, and a steel door with an observation window so they could stare at him like an animal in the Capitol’s Pennysound Zoo. 

He figured they’d stared at him over—how long had it been? He had no idea. They’d stared at him, and sometimes he thought they came in and injected him with something or another, but maybe he was just imagining that as well. They always left in a hurry.

He was trapped in a cell and he was fairly sure at this point he might be dying, but that seemed only appropriate given that Peeta, Johanna, and Annie were in cells in the Capitol, probably dying as well. He’d told them he’d look after them and he’d failed them too. 

He closed his eyes as the image of Johanna popped up before him, mutilated and dead, and he whispered a tired, “Sorry,” through his dry, acid-seared throat. He was tiring of failing everyone—he dropped his head back to the sweat-soaked pillow, tried to ride out the pain.

The door clanged open so loudly he lifted his head and opened his eyes. There was an older woman with long grey hair standing there looking at him, and a young man with glasses who he’d seen before bringing in the injections, so maybe this was real.

“He stinks,” the woman said bluntly, discussing him like he wasn’t even there.

Her companion followed suit. “He’s been in withdrawal for nearly a week, ma’am, that’s the smell of the vomit, and the toxins sweating out of him.”

“Please,” he said, licking his dry lips and looking up at the two of them with the mute appeal of an animal at extremes. He was begging them for liquor, or morphling, or death, he wasn’t sure which—deciding he might do better if he was specific, he managed, “Morphling?” But he was so tired and even those few words husked out of him like dry, rattling autumn grass in the wind.

“Let’s be clear. This is your own fault, Abernathy,” Ma’am said crisply. “Your drinking is your selfishness and weakness. It keeps you from being useful to everyone else. You’ll stay here until you’re completely sober and fit for the public, and I won’t waste any valuable morphling on the results of one man’s self-indulgence. You deserve some hardship—it’ll toughen you, dissuade you from that kind of weakness in the future. Heavensbee insists you can manage the girl, but otherwise, Abernathy, you’d be totally useless to me.”

He wheezed out a weak laugh at that, regretting how it hurt his ribs, already much abused from the constant vomiting. If they thought Katniss could be _managed_ they had another thing coming. Especially after she made it clear she wanted to kill him. The scratches from where she’d tried to claw his eyes out had still burned when they threw him in here. 

So whoever this was—some kind of authority figure here—held him in contempt and deemed him useless as well. Didn’t make her special, she had a lot of people to share that with. They were keeping him alive, making him suffer, so they could use him. It felt familiar. He rolled back over on the cot and huddled up against the pain once again, and he heard the door closing behind him. 

When he left the cell after a month of isolation, or so they told him, he didn’t even want to look in a mirror. He couldn’t keep his hands steady and even walking to the viewing booth to where they were taping Katniss looking like a total fool exhausted him.

He wondered if he’d gotten so paranoid he’d imagined all that stuff with President Coin or not. It was hard to tell. Granted, she wasn’t warm and fuzzy towards him, but she wasn’t as icy as she had been then. 

The whole period was one long muddle of agonizing pain and total confusion for him. It made him think of what the Capitol prisoners must be enduring because he’d failed them. Coin, or his vision of her, had been right. He deserved to suffer.

~~~~~~~~~~

The screams were real. Or at least, they seemed too real to deny. After the sight of Haymitch reaching out for her and her being yanked back by bruising, rough hands, Annie couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t.

Sometimes it was dark, sometimes it was light. Sometimes they fed her and sometimes they didn’t. They never touched her—nobody ever entered her cell, actually. But given that they’d taken her clothes from her and thrown her in there naked, the fear of what they meant to do was still there. She couldn’t be sure that they wouldn’t wait for her to feel safe and then add that particular torment. Only trays of food and water entered her cell, and she was expected to put it back through the sliding tray or else she wouldn’t get a fresh meal. Sometimes it felt like it had been only a couple hours since the last one, and sometimes it felt like it had been days. Maybe it had been days. 

Sometimes it was eerily silent and sometimes they played music or voices or screams. Finnick shrieked in pain, voice cracked with the strain, and pleaded with her to do anything to release him from it. Finnick told her that he never had loved her, that she was silly and crazy and broken and he was tired of taking care of her like a little child, laughing haughtily— _You’re not even that good a lay, you know_.

She shut her eyes and pressed her hands against her ears. _Not Finnick,_ she told herself. _Never._ He would never say that. He never treated her like a child. He’d looked at her that night during the meteor shower a few weeks before Snow read the Quell card, his green eyes shining with admiration: _You’re one of the strongest people I know, Annelle Cresta._

They’d made jabberjays in the arena and stolen her voice to torture Finnick. They were doing the same here, weren’t they? They wouldn’t steal Finnick from her. She would do whatever she had to do to stay strong.

After a while, she knew Finnick’s screams weren’t real. But she wondered if the ones that sounded like they came from down the hall were, and who else had been condemned to this place. Soon enough she identified them as Johanna and Peeta, and every time the screams started up again, she made herself listen, even as she shuddered and felt the darkness rising in her mind. This was real, and someone had to care.

~~~~~~~~~~

It all blended after a while for Johanna. Screams and water and electricity, an endless cycle of pain that never abated before being renewed, sinking deeper and deeper into it and still trying to muster the strength to tell them _Fuck you_ every time they came in again. Sometimes they questioned her about the other victors, about the rebellion. More often they didn’t, and that made it obvious that the point of this wasn’t information, but to break her. They’d shaved her head a few days ago for whatever reason. It wasn’t like they’d needed to do it to facilitate the torture. Perhaps they’d done it to upset her. Trying to torment her with an appeal to feminine vanity at this point was ridiculous. She’d already sacrificed her long hair years ago thanks to the Capitol, worn the skimpy dominatrix bullshit they forced on her—this was just the same old bullshit. Dazed, she rubbed her hands across the rough, uneven stubble left on her scalp. They’d made her plenty ugly inside already with all that they’d done over the years. What did it matter if they did something so petty to the shell of her?

It was worse hearing Peeta raving next door and shrieking at a Katniss that wasn’t there, betrayed and confused—what the hell were they doing to him in there? She didn’t know. All she knew was that his screams blended with her own in some unholy chorus, and there were other cries from down the hall: Annie. They’d bragged to her that they’d captured Finnick’s girlfriend from Mentor Central—what, four days ago? Who the hell knew how many days it had been? It might have just been hours.

Strapped to the chair again, she wanted to do nothing but sleep, but she knew the minute she did, they’d probably rush in and wake her up, tormenting her with her own vulnerability and exhaustion. So she stayed as awake as her muzzy brain could manage, left waiting for whenever they would choose to walk in and start it all over again. She didn’t expect anyone to come for them. And if they somehow did, it would be for the Mockingjay’s precious little boyfriend and Finnick’s girl—nobody cared about her. Nobody ever made her a priority, why would they start now? They told her that as they shocked her again and even as she made herself laugh and curse them, she knew they were right. She’d been written off once again. That was worse than the physical pain.

Finally the door swung open with the familiar shriek of hinges and she tried to not instinctively cringe. But it wasn’t the torturers. They told her they were from Thirteen, that they’d come to rescue her. A strong, tall man with silver hair and piercing blue eyes carried her because she was too weak to walk once they unstrapped her from the chair. This could be a lie too, because she couldn’t believe it was real. But she was too tired to resist it. Cradled against his chest, she finally let herself pass out.

~~~~~~~~~~

Annie clung to Finnick, burying her face in his shoulder, and even though the scent of his soap was harsh and unfamiliar, the smell of Finnick was there anyway. “It’s you,” she whispered, holding on to him and unwilling to let him go. “It’s you, Finnick.”

“It’s me,” he whispered back, and she felt him shuddering from the emotion as they pressed against the steel wall. “And you’re here and I’m not letting you go again.”

“You’d better not,” she said, laughing and crying all at once, “I think you’re the only thing holding this stupid sheet up right now.” But at least they’d given her that much on the hovercraft, apologizing that they didn’t have any spare uniforms. Nobody seemed to think to give her their shirt or anything, but that didn’t matter. She was here and Finnick was safe and he was real. 

She didn’t know how long she clung to him, trying to meld the two of them into one so she’d never, ever lose him again. Time didn’t matter at that moment either. But she heard the sound of someone awkwardly clearing their throat behind them—a man, from the timbre of it. She glanced over her shoulder to see Haymitch there, a respectful few steps away. 

She took notice enough that he looked terrible. Not just the kind of terrible that happened from a sleepless night or two, but almost as if he’d been in a cell right alongside her. For a moment she had a vision of his panicked expression, once again hearing the raw fear in his voice as he yelled her name and strong hands seized her, pulling her back from him. Shutting her eyes for a moment, she tried to re-center herself. Peacekeepers weren’t coming to drag her away. She was here, in District Thirteen, with Finnick. Terrible as it sounded, looking at Haymitch’s awful state compared to how he had been during the Quell helped prove that this was somewhere different and real. 

“Don’t mean to interrupt,” Haymitch said gruffly. “I’ll be out tonight, Finn. Room’s yours.”

“Where are you going to sleep?” Finnick protested, even as his grip on Annie tightened.

“Infirmary, I suppose. Peeta’s there,” there was a strange note in his voice that Annie couldn’t quite identify, “and Johanna too, of course.”

“I should…”

“Nah,” Haymitch cut him off with a shake of his hand and an uplifted hand. “She’ll be out of it for a while. I’ll be there in case, anyway. For you, it’ll keep till morning.” He nodded towards Annie. “You two tend to things here.” He didn’t quite look at her, the anxious glance towards her out of the corner of his eye giving him the aura of nervousness and guilt.

She’d think about that tomorrow, she decided, as Finnick led her through the harshly lit steel corridors. Swiping a keycard in the reader, a door slid open, and he flicked on the light switch. It wasn’t much—two bunks, a nightstand, a desk, some hooks on the wall hung with various articles of identical clothing—pale grey button-down shirts and dark grey trousers. “Who…” She nodded towards the other bunk, because the clothing hanging on the hooks opposite the one closest to the door smelled faintly of Finnick.

“That’s Haymitch’s bunk,” Finnick said. She should have put it together already, because it seemed obvious when he said it. “Single people don’t get to room alone here, and unfortunately, if you’re romantically involved, you have to get married to have a compartment together.”

Recognizing the gift Haymitch had discreetly given them with an evening of privacy, she felt the warmth of gratitude towards him. “Then we shouldn’t let you stay single for long,” she said, fingers gripping in the stiff fabric of Finnick’s shirt. “I’d hate to have to kick him out every night…”

Finnick let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-groan, a sound of arousal and amusement that she knew all too well. “I thought that we’d never have a wedding.”

“Shh,” she told him, putting her arms around his neck. “We will.” 

A few minutes later, pressed back into the mattress, she felt him trembling with the effort at restraint as he muttered thickly in her ear, “Annie…I can’t wait.”

“Then don’t, because I can’t either,” as she wrapped her legs around his, sighing in relief at the feel of his body against hers and then inside of hers. She felt the warmth of tears trickling down her cheeks, but they were only tears of relief after so many weeks of terror and of not knowing if he was alive. But he was alive and safe—he was hers again, and this was oh so real. 

The light shut off promptly at ten-thirty, plunging them both into darkness. It didn’t matter. She knew him so well and thus touch and sound were more than enough.

~~~~~~~~~~

When Johanna opened her eyes again, she saw Haymitch sitting in the chair next to her. Her eyes were drawn first by his now-short hair, shaved down nearly to the scalp on the sides, clipped close up top into fingertip-long spikes. It wasn’t a good look on him, but at least they’d done a more even job on him than the Capitol had on her. Then her mind cleared enough from that single-minded focus and she saw he looked terrible, almost like he’d been a Capitol guest himself. _But he wasn’t. He just left us,_ and vengefulness flared hot and sharp.

But he was here, and when she thought about it, of course Finnick would run for Annie and Katniss for Peeta. She would have expected to wake up alone, so to have someone there, even Haymitch, meant something. “Hey,” she rasped, trying to keep as still as possible. Moving anything hurt far too much.

“Hey,” he returned, bloodshot silver-grey eyes studying her. He looked sallow, wrung out, and far too thin, like he’d dropped something like forty pounds in the six weeks since she’d last seen him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Hell, I even tried to come on the rescue party, but they…”

She closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look at him because it made her think of how pathetic she must look herself—starved, beaten, exhausted. She tried to shut out the memory of Peeta’s raving screams and Annie’s ramblings and the feel of her own muscles seizing from electric shock. “Yeah,” she said, cutting him off.

“This is…I’ll go,” he said hastily, and she could hear he was slow to get up, as if it was too much exertion. 

“Yeah, sure,” she said bitterly. In all the time she’d known him, she could only make him feel a slight guilt over a couple of things. He’d always given it as good as he got in general, though, rather than running away like this—seemed like he couldn’t bear to look at her either. “Go tend to the kiddies, huh? They fucked up Peeta pretty good, I think.”

“We know,” he told her, “he halfway strangled Katniss to death.”

She laughed harshly until tears started rolling down her cheeks. “Good for him.” Johanna almost wanted to strangle Katniss herself at this point. 

“Do you want me to go?” he asked it so softly that she couldn’t have heard him right.

“Might as well stick around, I’m gonna be great company,” she answered. Maybe Haymitch and his sense of guilty obligation were the only company she’d have, but at least he cared enough to be there. That was better than being alone right now knowing that nobody else gave a shit whether she lived or died. Or at least, that as ever she came low on their list of priorities. Katniss would be obsessing over Peeta. Finnick was probably far too busy fucking Annie. She didn’t fool herself into imagining Haymitch hadn’t looked after Peeta first, but at least he was here and he gave a shit, so she’d take him and his guilt if need be. 

They chased Haymitch off while they redressed her wounds. She debated flippantly telling them it was no big deal because plenty of the victors had seen her naked in the Training Center, but passed on the opportunity. But then he returned seemingly the first possible moment. He apologized with a slightly snarky air, “No flowers or chocolates, Jo, they won’t let me bring ‘em.”

“I’d rather have some booze anyway,” she said crossly—alcohol would have dimmed everything for her, though the morphling in her veins helped too. 

“You and me both,” and it hurt her aching muscles to laugh but it felt good anyway. They didn’t really talk, because they couldn’t talk about anything that really mattered, and to talk about stupid trivial things right now would have been almost obscene. He told her how the war was going, and then they lapsed into silence. After a little while of pure discomfort, it turned into the kind of silence that was simply no need for words to fill the air rather than not knowing what to say. He was sorry and he’d made it a point to come and look after her. She wasn’t sure if that was enough or if she forgave him for having to leave her behind. Granted, she’d agreed going in that she accepted she might die or be captured, but then she’d actually endured it. But still, it was far more than anyone else offered her.

She drifted off from the morphling into a blissfully painless haze, and when she woke up again she saw he was still there, scrunched into the chair beside her bed, head tucked down onto his shoulder as he’d dozed off himself. He looked tired and unsettled and haunted, even in sleep. She closed her eyes again, not sure if his being there made her feel safe enough to give over to the vulnerability of sleep—really, she couldn’t fully trust anyone for that, not Haymitch and not Finnick because they’d both abandoned her—but at least it meant she wasn’t alone.

~~~~~~~~~~

The weeks since the rescue had flown by much quicker than the interminable hell of the six weeks following the Quell. The war wore on, Two fell, and all that remained was to capture the Capitol now. At least Finnick and Annie had forgiven him for his particular failure in her case, even if he couldn’t quite forgive himself. In the weeks of her captivity he’d had enough visions of the girl he’d just finally met as yet another casualty alongside Johanna and Peeta to just let them out of his brain. His guilt stayed there like poison.

It didn’t help that not everything was put to rights by any means. Finnick and Annie were about the only two to have even the veneer of normality. Katniss still walked around like a ghost, and seemingly tried to get herself killed at every turn, maybe so she wouldn’t have to deal with the guilt and pain over the boy. Peeta still ended up raving and screaming for no apparent reason sometimes, and the sight of him constantly drugged and in shackles made something in Haymitch die a little bit more inside. He’d seen plenty of kids die. At this point he wasn’t sure they hadn’t gotten the better part of it against Peeta Mellark. 

The boy’s confused, angry howls and contorted, rabid expression still featured some nights along with all the other phantasmagoric visions, until he gave up and took sleep syrup to get a dreamless rest. Especially as he had a new roommate with Finnick moving out—a Ten native, Dalton Sayers. Seemed nice enough, but he wasn’t a victor. Dalton wouldn’t understand the pathetic spectacle of a forty-one-year-old man screaming in the night like a scared little boy at things that weren’t there.

Johanna still was in the infirmary and he saw her with a morphling line attached to her arm more often than not—but given that he’d helped put her there, he wasn’t going to be the one to express concerns that after this long, she probably was more addicted to the painkillers than in need of them for pain. It wasn’t like he was anyone to talk about coping chemically, not with the booze and now the sleep syrup. 

But today was a happier day at least. He’d been clever to take himself out of the dancing by volunteering as the fiddler. Watching Annie and Finnick out there taking their first dance as husband and wife, nobody could doubt that they made a fine pair together.

He itched for a drink of something far stronger than cider, though, thinking about too many other weddings. Weddings he’d been to with too many friends and family that were now dead. Weddings he hadn’t been invited to once the district made it clear he was their pariah. A wedding of his own that he’d never had and never would. Looking at the two of them, radiant in their love for each other, he wanted to believe in something as beautiful as the idea of _forever_ , but he wasn’t sure he could. So he played his fiddle as best he could as his gift to the two of them, and let everyone dance and have a joyful day. If happiness might be fleeting, might as well live it up as best as possible. If it somehow lasted, then the memories would be all the sweeter.

Seeing Johanna standing off to the side, hanging back deliberately and not joining the dances, he spared her a slight nod. At least they understood each other.

~~~~~~~~~~

It was getting to be a bad habit, waking up in the infirmary with Haymitch there. “Johanna?” he asked, leaning over her, his ever-exhausted face coming into focus. The softness and concern in his grey eyes cut at her like a knife.

“Fuck you, Haymitch, go away,” she wanted to snap it, but it came out as more of a rough whisper. She could barely hold in the screams that still threatened to break loose. The water—they were either going to plunge her under and hold her there until her lungs cried out for air and she was moments from drowning, or they’d throw it on her and then shock her with the wires.

“Hey. You’re OK now.” No she wasn’t. She’d failed. That was all that mattered. As hard as she’d pushed herself, the running and throwing up and giving up the morphling—it had all been for the purpose of going to the Capitol and killing Snow herself. Fuck Katniss on that score, Johanna had far more claim to him. But she wasn’t going to get to do it. She’d failed. Weak. Pathetic. Even Peeta who didn’t even know what was real anymore had more chance than her now. She didn’t want him sitting there with that look on his face that told her just how broken she was, and so she did her best to make him leave.

“Like you even put your name in to go be a soldier,” she hissed, wanting nothing to much as to hurt _someone_ , and he would do simply because he was stupid enough to be there and to try to soothe her when she couldn’t bear her own failure. “Don’t pretend like we’re the same, Haymitch, I at least tried.” She’d given it everything she had, and she’d still failed.

“I put my name in, Johanna,” he told her, his voice gruff but his eyes not wavering from hers, “and they invalided me out just as quickly as psychologically unfit.” He gave a tight, angry laugh. “Probably got plenty of ammunition for that notion when they took me off the bottle, I’ll admit. But dammit, if you could do the training given the rough shape you were in…I could have done it, I know it. I managed to get ready for the damn Quell.” The frustrated pain of being excluded and judged and discarded was right there in his voice; and it stirred the answering feeling within her. Suddenly Haymitch’s company didn’t grate the way a visit from someone like Finnick or Katniss would, if they bothered to show. They had succeeded, they would go and fight, and so their very presence would rub that sudden gulf between them right in her face. She’d almost rather they stayed away. Haymitch came here first, as he had last time, and she couldn’t scare him off.

He must have seen something in her face because suddenly he smirked but it was a tired expression. “Not much has changed, has it—they still want only the young and pretty and appealing ones for the camera, huh? They don’t want those of us that can’t quite hide how the Capitol knocked us around.” He leaned down and put a hand on her shoulder. “You openly told Snow to fuck himself. So you’re worth a dozen of any of them,” he said fiercely, and the look on his face told her he wasn’t just telling her what she wanted to hear.

Finnick and Katniss dropped by and she embarrassed herself there, begging Katniss to kill Snow. But at least by the time Annie came by, she was calmer, sniffing her pine needle sachet. Haymitch was still there.

Not like she’d interacted much with the new Mrs. Odair, though Finnick admitted Annie failed the intake assessment on psychological grounds. “So, kids,” she said, giving Annie and Haymitch a fierce smile, “looks like it’s us three crazies as the rejects.” She patted the bed, striving for nonchalance, but glad to not be left alone. “Pull up a seat, you two. Anyone got some cards or something, or have they banned _that_ in this shithole as well?”

~~~~~~~~~~

For Annie, the wait proved interminable once Star Squad left for the Capitol. They got to see the same propos as the rest of Panem, and no more. Haymitch got the occasional update, but President Coin had revoked his previous access to Central Command now that, with Katniss gone, they considered him unnecessary as a military asset, though that pretty much described all three of them. For her, dealing with two long-term Hunger Games mentors wasn’t easy, given how they growled and complained about being excluded from having that immediate knowledge, after years in Mentor Central. Haymitch took it worst, probably because he’d previously had that access, and with Katniss, Peeta, and Finnick all dear to him, he had the most to lose.

They all had their jobs, of course—"unnecessary as a military asset" or not, no Thirteen citizen was exempt from contributing, so Annie worked in the kitchens, Haymitch in the infirmary, and Johanna in the laundry. But that didn’t fill all the hours of the day by any means. They took occasional walks topside during Reflection since Doctor Aurelius had recommended it as therapy for Johanna, although passing through the depressing freshly bombed-out rubble to get to the woods probably took its toll. They played cards for pencils, books, or whatever useless stakes they could gather as markers, since Thirteen had no currency and without any real possessions and no ownership and access when it came to food, there was nothing to bet except the satisfaction of winning and the knowledge of distraction for staving off boredom and the encroaching fear for a little while. They rigged a chess set of various mismatched odds and ends and until Annie wrote down a key for it to seal the deal, they ended up arguing whether the nut and bolt was a bishop or a castle. 

Haymitch joined them at dinner and Johanna reached back and elbowed him as he sat down, saying with a smirk, “I don’t know about Annie, but maybe we ought to pull out strip poker tonight. Not like you haven’t seen me na—“

Looking at Haymitch’s face, Annie felt herself start to shake all over. The way he looked at her, unable to hide the raw grief in his eyes, he was screaming inside. “No,” she whispered, interrupting Johanna. The word was thick on her tongue, and she began instinctively shaking her head in useless denial.

“They’ll take the Capitol within a few days. But the report is that everyone on Star Squad,” Haymitch said heavily, “was killed in action this afternoon.”

Her hands went over her ears but it was too late. His words in that rough twang echoed in her head anyway. _Killed in action this afternoon…killed in action this afternoon…_

 _Finnick!_ she cried out in her head, feeling the dark waters starting to close in on her. But Finnick wasn’t there, and now he’d never be there. Choking, drowning in it, she huddled in on herself. _My name…my name is Annie Odair…_

 _The tragic young widow Odair,_ she could hear Caesar Flickerman saying it, savoring it. She’d lost Mags and now she’d lost Finnick too. It was unbearable.

She startled and pushed away at the feel of a hand on her shoulder. She looked up, surprised to see Johanna had come to her side of the table. “C’mon,” Johanna said. “Let’s get you back to your compartment.”

She couldn’t even think about Katniss and Peeta and the others right now. Grateful for that strength from Johanna, she kept it together until they reached the room she and Finnick had shared. _Not much for a first newlywed home, but it’ll do,_ he’d said laughingly.

 _It has a bed,_ she pointed out to him as she ran her tongue around the shell of his ear and pushed him back on that same bed. Johanna squeezed her shoulder one last time and told her she’d come get her for breakfast. No exceptions, no food outside of the mess hall, not even for this. Then to Annie’s everlasting gratitude, she left. The sheets had been changed in the weeks since he left, so they no longer smelled of him. Curled in on herself on the bed, she buried her nose in one of his shirts, breathing in his scent, and only then did she finally let herself start to cry.

~~~~~~~~~~

The few patients in the infirmary really weren’t in need of much help anyway, and Haymitch found they all carried too many reminders. A fifteen-year-old boy had a broken ankle from military training. Haymitch tried to not look at him and automatically think about how quickly that would have killed him in the Games, even with as competent as the kid looked otherwise. He could rattle off eight fifteen-year-old boys from Twelve who’d died in the Games and picture all their faces, both alive and then later on the slab of the tribute morgue. No, nine. Toby Mercer’s birthday was the day before the interviews—happy fucking birthday to him.

An elderly man had the flu, and his kind eyes and quiet demeanor reminded him too much of old Woof.

It wasn’t like the doctors needed him anyway to deal with such little things. So he busied himself tallying supplies and reorganizing shelves that were already pin-straight. They’d cut off the sleep syrup last week, saying he needed to stop using it as a crutch. Seeing the bottles of it, he reached up, hand open to grab one. He hesitated, remembering Katniss telling him about the preps chained to the wall down on the detention level, remembering the cell they’d thrown him in to live or die as fate decreed. They would notice. Twice-daily inventory, and it wouldn’t be hard to figure out an employee of the infirmary took it. He knew they already eyed him carefully, as if he’d grab the rubbing alcohol at any moment and start swigging.

He looked down at the brown glass jugs of rubbing alcohol on the lowest shelf. Maybe he might do that, at least tonight. If it killed him, that was fine. He needed something, because it twisted and burned within him unbearably. He’d done this dance before, death coming in threes, wiping out everyone that mattered. _Ma, Ash, Briar. Finnick, Katniss, Peeta._

What a fucking useless life—they’d all told him that, Peeta by drying him out and shoving him aside at the reaping rather than trusting him to die for the girl, Coin by drying him out as she had, Central Command by rejecting him from military training. At this point, his life wasn't even deemed worth enough to sacrifice it for someone else’s.

 _I can’t do this again_ , staring at the rubbing alcohol bleakly. Letting people in and seeing them all wiped off the face of the earth in one fell swoop, left to endure it alone—he hadn’t been strong enough at sixteen, he certainly wasn’t strong enough now.

“Abernathy?” he heard, and turned to see Doctor Harcourt there. “Get to your quarters already. It’s after midnight. Your shift ended hours and hours ago. Nothing needing you here.” 

“Yeah, sure,” he said, hanging the clipboard on the peg. _Nothing needing me anywhere, pal._ Banished from the infirmary, he’d have to just deal with it as best he could and hope it didn’t cause Dalton too many issues tonight. If he kept wandering the corridors, they’d end up forcibly shoving him in his room anyway. 

Stepping in the elevator, he punched the button for the 11th floor. Though to his impatience, it stopped on the 36th floor, but he was surprised to see Johanna get in, punching the button for the 14th floor. In other circumstances he would have drawled a joke about her still being up from an urgent need for scrubbing undershorts after midnight. Tonight wasn’t that night. He knew what had kept her up.

All he could think with her standing in front of him, as he looked at the rigid set of her shoulders and the untidy mop of short brown spikes on her head, was that maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe she hadn’t cared for Katniss and Peeta quite as deeply as he had, but she’d cared, and she’d loved Finnick as a brother just as Haymitch had. 

They were the same, weren’t they? Oh, they’d always been too similar to deny, enough that they carefully turned to each other. Always been so alone, always had that unspoken agreement that it was OK to be snarky and they would never make each other feel guilty for it the way other people did simply by being better and kinder, showing that somehow, they’d come through the Games with less scars. Yeah, well, they hadn’t had every loved one they had murdered on their account either. But now she’d felt what it was like to finally be pushed so far as to fall into a place where even the strongest willpower finally failed. She had gone down into to that bottomless darkness, with demons so bad that only chemicals that could make a too-smart brain somewhat hazy were the only fucking way to get through another day. They were just alike now in total defeat and he couldn’t help but grieve a little for that fact. All he could do was try to be there, because he’d had nobody there for him, and let her know that he’d been through it too. Maybe there was no light at the end of the tunnel, but he wouldn’t let her go to hell alone.

“Annie?” he asked, remembering she’d escorted Annie off. The abrupt end of the silence seemed to carry the startle of pistol shot from how Johanna jumped slightly at it.

“Sleeping, I imagine,” she replied, and she turned to face him. She looked at him, tired eyes in a tired face, and then she startled him in turn as she abruptly kissed him. He could feel the hunger in it—not desire, just the unbearable ache of solitude and grief, and he felt himself answering it, arms sliding around her, needing her there. Likely as not that desire had been burned out of both of them, but to find he wasn’t alone in this world, that there was somebody who could understand, moved him with a sense of relief. She glanced up at him. “So here’s the deal. You come to my compartment. We fuck it out.”

They’d slept together once before. Desire had nothing to do with it that time either, just coping with an unbearable situation. But this time she wasn’t a skittish seventeen-year-old facing her first patron—she was undeniably a woman now. She was asking for him to be a friend this time, not a whore, and that made all the difference. Besides, without alcohol or sleep syrup, sex and a few hours’ empathetic company seemed like as good a solution as any right now. He’d try about anything to get through this first grief-riddled night. Last time he’d been doped to the gills with sleep syrup to deal with severely burned hands. He couldn’t help the relief at seeing a spark again in those hazel-tinged eyes of hers, and to hear she didn’t suggest booze or morphling. Maybe there was some life in her yet. 

The elevator stopped on the 14th floor and by way of answer, he followed her out, down the hall and into the dark of her compartment. He was glad that he couldn’t see, because seeing the empty bunk that had belonged to Katniss would have been too much. Much as he usually dreaded it, this time all-concealing darkness was a mercy.

~~~~~~~~~~

Johanna woke up as usual right when the lights snapped on at six thirty, and found two things. First, that Haymitch was gone, which relieved her, because that spared them both dealing with this morning. Watching him get dressed and either silence or inane chatter would have reminded her too much of when she was seventeen. He’d been smart enough to slip away quietly in the night. The chunky black emergency flashlight was on the nightstand rather than in the drawer where it belonged. He must have used it to find his clothes.

Second, the covers were carefully draped over her in a way that she knew had to be deliberate. That did remind her of being a teenager, but not awkwardly so—he’d done that for her the night she fell asleep on the couch in the Twelve apartment after drinking with him, trying to forget Finnick.

Well, they’d both done their best to forget Finnick last night. It said something about the depths of her misery that not being able to see him as she fucked him hadn’t scared her off the entire idea. But on some level, she must have still known that he was safe, that she could trust him. 

Not that it had been gentle and full of sweet nothings—urgent and a little rough, more like. Compared to how dispassionate he’d been years ago, this time she’d felt just how much in him seethed beneath the skin. At least this time she felt like she was fucking a friend rather than a skilled whore. But it was about forgetfulness, not tenderness. They didn’t make any pretense at love. The only thing he’d said to her was afterwards, a rough murmur of _I’m glad you didn’t leave too_ , although there was an odd note in his voice she couldn’t quite place.

She hadn’t answered. Anything she could have said felt like it would expose too much. He had to know she was glad he was there too. 

Pushing aside the covers and kneeling on the floor beside the bed, trying to not glance over at Katniss’ bunk and her clothes still hanging on their hooks, she gathered up her discarded clothes to throw them down the laundry chute. As she picked up her shirt, a pale grey button _plinked_ to the floor. “Shit,” she sighed, grasping it between her fingertips and setting it on the nightstand. Looking over the placket to see which one it was, her brow furrowed as she saw it wasn’t one of hers, because they were all there. She must have ripped it off Haymitch’s shirt last night in her haste. 

Scrubbed down with a washcloth and dressed, she tucked the button into the pocket of her shirt and headed for Annie’s. Somehow it helped to have her there, screwed up as that probably sounded. Someone else’s grief for Finnick logically beat hers, and that kept it from being a vast chasm—though nobody served as that person for Annie. As for Haymitch, he’d lost three in one fell swoop. She liked the kids, but she knew the old bastard had loved them. It looked like she would be the one to try to buck them up as best she could, even as she mourned her best friend.

Annie was as bad as expected. Haymitch, though, seemed to have rallied, maybe in his determination to help look after Annie, his concern for her obvious. After breakfast, he cornered Johanna. She hoped like hell he wasn’t going to bring up last night. It was done, it had helped, but they didn’t need to agonize over it.

“Finn’s gone,” he said steadily, eyes on hers. “And he was like a brother, to you and me both. So, we’re agreed that his widow is like our sister and our responsibility moves to look after her?”

 _This is how he works_ , remembering how he’d gathered himself together both last year and this year with the faintest glimmer of hope. If he didn’t have someone to look after, someone to try to save, someone to fight for, that was when he broke down. She nodded. “Agreed.” She raised an eyebrow. “Are we talking even after the war, when she goes back to Four?”

“What, anyone more promising to go back to in Seven I don’t know about?” he asked with an answering quirk of his own brow. 

“Asshole,” she hissed irritably. “You know there’s not.”

“And Twelve’s a total wasteland.” He might as well have worn his sense of guilt about that as a neon sign. “So yeah, maybe we go to Four with Annie. Look after her. At least for a little while. Or if she wants to go to Seven, or whatever.”

“All right.” In a way it was a relief to have some kind of plan rather than just going back to the same empty house in the Glade. Even Blight and Cedrus were gone now, slight as her relationships with them had been. She’d be with Haymitch, a man who understood all of her, and be with Annie, someone who actually might need her a little bit. That sounded like a pretty good deal to her. She could feel these tenuous new bonds, and in a way they felt like security rather than shackles. “Here.” She fished in her pocket and turned his hand over, pressing the missing button into his palm and holding his gaze with hers as she did so, somehow unable to look away. “You might want to sew that back on.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Time passed in something of a blur for Annie. She got up and got dressed because Haymitch or Johanna came to get her, and she went and ate because Haymitch and Johanna stared with obvious concern. She’d really have preferred to stay in her bed, but consciously, she knew Thirteen wouldn’t allow it. Non-productivity wouldn’t be tolerated. So had she retained any feeling beyond the searing grief and the dark numbness it gave to everything else, she probably would have been grateful that they didn’t abandon her to the mercies of the bureaucracy. After all, they’d really been Finnick’s friends, not hers. Instead, they closed ranks around her in a way that she recognized from Victors’ Bayou.

But in a way, Haymitch particularly was a relief, because in between his fussing over her, when his mask slipped she could see the void of grief in him too. He’d lost three people. 

Although it seemed he hadn’t, the night the Capitol finally fell and Katniss and Peeta showed up at the gates of the Presidential Mansion. Although the reports were grim, saying that the two young victors might not last the night due to the severity of their burns. Dozens and dozens of Capitol children hadn’t survived, turned into human shields by President Snow, and fourteen medics from Thirteen became casualties as well. Primrose Everdeen was among the lost. Annie tried to spare a bit of grief for that, and found right now she couldn’t. It was all she could do to not fall apart inside and slip beneath the waves forever.

“There’s a hovercraft heading there in a few hours? I gotta pack,” Haymitch said frantically, already pushing up from the table, with his movements determined and purposeful but tense with fear.

“Finnick?” she croaked hopefully, looking at Plutarch.

Plutarch looked back at her, his blue eyes suddenly gentle, and she looked away, not needing and not wanting to hear the words. “I’m sorry, Annie. He was k—“

She clapped her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, remembering little details about Finnick with utter desperation to keep afloat. He had a small scar on the back of one knee, one that the Capitol had never erased. He never, ever hung up his stupid toothbrush, just left it lying beside the sink, and that drove her crazy. _Crazy Annie crazy Annie Annie’s gone crazy…_

She startled at the feel of a hand grasping her shoulder and opened her eyes to see Plutarch was gone, and Johanna stood there, Haymitch hovering anxiously nearby. “He’s gotta go to the Capitol,” Johanna said grimly, jerking a thumb over her shoulder towards Haymitch. “But we stick together, us three. And I want to go back there for once by choice so they can see I’m still here.”

 _I am, but Finnick isn’t._ Still, Mags had carried on for years as a widow after her husband Ekman had died, still mentoring, still watching at least one kid die in the arena every single year. Mags, who’d sacrificed herself for Finnick, and her nails cut into her palms and her eyes stung as she thought what little time that had bought him.

A lifetime could never have been enough. But in that time he had been her husband and she’d loved him as best she could, and that was more than they’d ever thought they’d have. She would think about Finnick, and mourn, but if she let herself think only about him, the memory of the man who’d been her rock and anchor for five years would now use all that weight to drag her down forever. So she imagined Mags’ courage instead, and saw the strength of these two people now trying to help support her. Whether it was for Finnick’s sake or not didn’t matter. Mags had helped her simply because she was from Four. The simple compassion for another’s need was what counted, not its cause. That helped buoy her mind and soul just enough. 

Nodding, she looked up at the two of them, as she brushed her wild, tangled hair back from her forehead, suddenly craving the use of a hairbrush. Tonight, alone again, she’d cry again for Finnick. But for now, she thought she could be strong enough to face the rest of the day. “We’ll all go,” she answered.

~~~~~~~~~~

She barely saw Haymitch over the next few weeks, given that despite having quarters in the Presidential Mansion with the rest of them, he virtually lived in the hospital. How many hours he spent staring through a plate glass window at the burned bodies of the two teenagers that were his charges, Johanna didn’t want to know. She knew he must be thinking of mutilated, dead kids laid out on the slabs down in the tribute morgue.

The fact that the hospital let him sleep in a cot in an unused room, and they had a chair set up outside the burn ward for him, said more than enough. Yeah, as long as the kids were struggling on he should be there for them, willing them to stay alive, but he didn’t need her right then. That whole Twelve bond seemed to shut her out. 

Plus his absence did leave her the lion’s share of making sure Annie also didn’t fade out. Annie surprised her, though. Sometimes she showed up with raw, red-rimmed eyes, and sometimes she still did her thing with shutting her eyes and covering her ears. But compared to Haymitch saying what a wreck Finnick had been without her, Annie coped. Johanna could have cynically supposed a lack of feeling in her, but she’d seen those two at their wedding, and she’d seen how devastated Annie was when Haymitch delivered the news.

Johanna knew a thing or two about carrying on despite leaving bloody tracks with each step, and she suspected that was Annie’s game here. She couldn’t help but respect the Four victor more than she’d have imagined because of it. It helped her too, having someone to look after. That was what snapped Haymitch out of his grief enough to keep going. It kept her from the worst of her own loss of Finnick, and gave her something to do. It made it easier to shut out the rest of the world.

Still, when one morning Annie didn’t come down for breakfast, Johanna’s concern was that Annie had relapsed. She’d been sleeping a lot lately. Maybe this would be another day Johanna had to go coax her to get dressed, like a little kid. Yeah, well, if she was honest she’d admit there were days in the year after her family died when she just stayed in bed in her pajamas and didn’t eat, didn’t do anything at all because even getting dressed or eating seemed too big a burden, let alone going outside to do things that didn’t seem to matter.

Going upstairs and knocking on Annie’s door, she pushed it open. The curtains were pulled back and the room was full of light, which was a relief. Annie wasn’t lying on the bed either, instead seated on the plush blue velvet cushion of the window seat, one foot tucked up underneath her as she stared out into the distance. This window faced Snow’s precious rose gardens, where the man himself was kept prisoner as his trial would be up soon. “Breakfast is on,” Johanna broke the silence as she sat down beside Annie, and Annie turned her head.

“I’m not sure I can keep anything down.” Johanna noticed how she chewed her lip. “I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant,” her voice broke on the last word.

 _Oh, Finn. Shit._ Just one more thing the Capitol stole away—but Johanna pushed aside his memory for the minute, focusing on the living woman in front of her. “Oh, hell,” she sighed, and it was instinct rather than conscious decision that made her raise her arms. The shock as Annie slipped into the hug almost made her recoil—what the fuck was she doing anyway, this whole cuddly comforting thing wasn’t her business—but then it clicked and it felt right, so she just held on. “It’ll be OK. You’ll see.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Breathing in the thick perfume of roses in the greenhouse, even in the dead of winter, Haymitch tried to keep his body from trembling at the associations. White roses by the ashes of his old Seam house, the “talk” he and Snow had in these very gardens his first year as a mentor about his duties— _all of them_ —as a victor. The rose Snow had handed him as a way to set his mark on Haymitch again and remind him to be careful, after he called him into his office for the first time in years, right before the opening ceremonies of the 74th. _It seems your girl tribute this year has quite the following already, Mister Abernathy…_

 _Won’t amount to much, I imagine. She’s an impulsive Twelve kid trying to save her baby sister._ Trying desperately to hide that spark kindled within him that maybe this year it could be different, that he could bring one home alive, because if Snow saw any kind of hope in Haymitch he’d move to squash it.

 _Is that truly all she is?_ Snow had seen the three-finger salute at the reaping and even then, he must have known something was different. So he’d tried to kill Katniss, kill off any threat at all. But only now had he destroyed her. The girl had lived, but she acted like the walking dead in a way that Haymitch recognized all too well from his first year after the arena.

At least Peeta wasn’t dead, not like Briar. There was still a chance there, and the girl’s ma was still alive. Still, as he found the old man bound to his chair, the reversal of their previous positions seemed like an exquisite irony. “Good evening, Mister Abernathy. This seems to be a popular destination. You just missed Miss Mason a few minutes ago. Perhaps the Mockingjay herself will grace me with her presence before the end.”

When Haymitch didn’t reply, standing there silently with his arms folded, Snow shuffled a little bit, raising one white eyebrow. “Nothing to say? Perhaps you’ve finally learned that you’re not half so cl—“

With that, he knew he’d won this round. For the first time in his life, he interrupted Coriolanus Snow. “Shut up, old man. Let’s not lie to each other, mm? We both know it’s not like you have any kind of power over me now.”

“Don’t I? Do you really think killing me tomorrow satisfies anything but a need for symbolic vengeance? It won’t return you to the child you were, will it?”

That round went to Snow, and Haymitch felt the fury rising within him that he could so casually speak about lives he’d destroyed. “No. But you won’t get to do it to anyone else. That’s something.”

“The nature of people won’t change. The arenas and this war prove quickly enough just how easily people resort to their most base nature, don’t they?”

“At least I only killed to survive.” He shook his head, snorting in derision. “You? Using _babies_ as a human shield, sacrificing your precious Capitolites’ children just to save your sorry ass, and then killing them off in the end? All your excuses about all your lies and murders and whoring us out about how it was ‘for the common good’ and ‘to preserve peace and order’. The world finally saw the real Coriolanus Snow.”

Snow smiled with those blood-streaked teeth. “Be careful with this new world that you’re building. They say that Paradise had a hidden serpent that ruined it.” What did _that_ even mean? He couldn’t place the reference, probably some old book or film or play from before the disasters, hidden away in the Capitol archives and banned out in the districts.

At that point, he couldn’t see any purpose to staying here and having Snow try to jab at him. He’d come to prove to himself that the monster was now made powerless, now all that was left to try to pick up the innumerable broken pieces. “I’m really not in the mood for your little games anymore. Goodbye. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure.” He didn’t even glance back with his final, dismissive words to the man—“Happy New Year.” Come morning, Snow would live to see only hours of that year. Coin wanted a fresh start to a new year, it seemed. _Out with the old world and in with the new._

Though even as he walked away, the weight of it descended on him, the casually dismissive way Snow hadn’t even acknowledged any of it. The whoring to keep Haymitch in control, the murders of three innocent people to shock him into compliance, the Games and all their suffering—and he was just one man. Snow had plenty more victims to his credit. But to the end, Snow remained defiantly unwilling to accept any responsibility. Fucker actually believed he’d done what was necessary.

Finding his way to Snow’s study, he cheerfully helped himself to the liquor cabinet. He’d guiltily nipped a little here and there in the last weeks, endlessly dealing with everything: Finnick, Katniss, Peeta, images of burned children. But tonight he intended to get openly and thoroughly drunk. Fuck Coin if she wanted to yap at him about it. Hopefully none of this was poisoned. Sinking down into a soft maroon leather chair by the fireside, he didn’t bother with a glass, sipping directly from the heavy crystal—whatever the hell they called it for brandy. Decanter? It was almost empty to begin, he’d have to get up and swipe something else to keep going.

But the fire and the liquor couldn’t warm the chill from his bones. Snow died tomorrow and it changed nothing. Katniss was still dead inside, Peeta was still a ruin. He hadn’t saved either of them in the end. He hadn’t really saved anyone, had he? Too many had died in the last six months on account of his trying: Seeder, Chaff, Cecelia, Woof, Mags…Finnick. As if Haymitch fucking dumbass Abernathy could actually make a difference for once. When he got bright ideas, people just died or suffered.

He couldn’t bear it, thinking of all the dead friends whose ghosts now hung heavy around him. More burdens to bear along with forty-six dead kids and two destroyed ones. With one smooth motion he threw the now-empty bottle and watched it smash against the heavy stones of the fireplace, strangely satisfied at having simply broken something of Snow’s. 

“Oh, it’s that kind of a party?” He turned to see Johanna there. She crossed to the liquor cabinet and grabbed another bottle. She turned to him and shook the bottle, a sharp-edged feral smile on her face. Her eyes glittered with a barely suppressed rage. Snow said she’d been by to see him as well-- to look at her, Snow had worked her over hard in that final farewell, just to mess with her. “Goodie.”

“Pull up a seat,” he drawled, sweeping an arm out to indicate the chair opposite, “but bring another bottle while you’re at it.”

“Figured I’d try giving your favorite method a whirl here,” she shrugged, handing him a bottle. After her struggles with the morphling that really ought to alarm him but somehow he didn’t have enough room to feel anything more tonight. He was already drinking to try to dull it all.

Reading the label, he wasn’t sure whether he was laughing or on the verge of retching. She hadn’t looked at the bottle she grabbed. This was a special commemorative treat for the Third Quell—bourbon that One had aged until this year before bottling it. Bourbon, Twelve’s signature liquor, distilled twenty-five years ago in honor of the Second Quell’s “victor”. “What, getting picky with your booze now?” Johanna said with a snicker.

He looked up at her, seeing her sprawled in the chair taking hefty gulps—not ladylike sips—of the amber liquid in her own bottle. She was still living and still fighting, she’d clearly found some of her fire again, and that helped keep the crushing guilt at bay for a little while. The faint glow of liquor already in him, far more potent for so many months without a good buzz, didn’t hurt that goal either. So he opened the bottle and toasted her, saying, “Let’s hope he rots in hell.”

Things were a little bit of a blur after that, though in the pleasant way where he wasn’t gone by any means, he still was aware enough. Just meant everything was fuzzy enough it didn’t matter. Drunk was the only time in his life that nothing hurt.

He knew they’d stumbled upstairs, and he was with Johanna. But the satisfaction was of a savage kind, all a big _to hell with you_ to the man in the rose gardens below as two of his former sex slaves fucked in his own bed. 

He must have said something aloud because Johanna laughed gutturally and said, “Ought to go downstairs and tell him. You think he ever fucked his little wifey here? Or maybe someone after she died? Maybe he wanted to fuck some of _us_ here?”

“No,” he said harshly, staring at the bed curtains of pale green brocade with a fresh surge of hatred. “He only ever liked fucking people _over_.” Snow had never desired any of them—only what use he could make of them to help secure more power. She laughed again and fastened her teeth in his shoulder, urging him on once more.

She barely looked at him. As was, it was fierce and angry, fast and almost more like wrestling than fucking. He had a distant thought that for some reason she was scared of being pinned down, but couldn’t seem to grasp it enough to fully realize it, and it seemed like she was angry rather than frightened, and they were rolling over and over again often enough in that constant war for dominance and control that it didn’t matter anyway. They used each other to prove something to Coriolanus Snow and right in that moment, indulging that mutual desire for proving a point felt like a sweet vengeance.

That lasted about as long as it took him to stumble back to his room, when the sorrow descended again. They were all still dead and he was still a worthless wreck. He broke a chair as he tripped over it, then grabbed a bottle hidden in the cabinet of the nightstand and started in on it as the ghosts came closer, the only ones who would stay and keep him company, and whispered all their knowledge of his guilt. So the blackness of oblivion was a blessed release.

Of course, he couldn’t even have that peace, because Katniss came along. Glaring up blearily at her, he loathed her right then. Little brat, she made her contempt clear as she threw water on him like a dog that wouldn’t behave. Wouldn’t think to wait for him to wake up because of _course_ her stupid melodramatic teenaged problems always were so urgent, and of _course_ Haymitch had no right to any time or space of his own, she thought she owned him. _Fuck off, girl, I’m not here just to be your little advice-whore,_ he almost snarled at her, _so leave me alone tonight. I’m busy dealing with my own shit._

“What is it, sweetheart? More boy trouble?” he drawled instead, instinctively covering the nearly incandescent rage with the mask of insolent amusement. Couldn’t let people see the violent bastard within him.

The stricken look on her face, like he’d slapped her, punctured through the liquor and the grief and the rage, and the current reality came rushing back to him—Prim, Peeta, all of it. She turned and ran, and as he tried to take it back with a “OK, not funny, not funny,” yelling for her to come back, he knew she wouldn’t, and as he tried to follow her and ended up halfway to the door before the world wobbled sideways and he landed on the carpet, he knew miserably that he couldn’t catch her and try to fix it. He couldn’t fix anything.

~~~~~~~~~~

The morning of the execution, it seemed to Annie a miserable irony that it was one of the rare days she wasn’t doubled over a toilet vomiting. Although as they were herded into a conference room together, to judge from Haymitch’s bleary eyes and the way Johanna grimaced and rubbed her temples when she thought nobody was looking, they might have taken up that slack for her. Apparently they’d been drinking last night. Some part of her wished she could join them. Not enough to get hammered as they obviously had, but just enough to chase the worst edge off everything. But she couldn’t. She had to look out for the baby, and honestly, she could too easily see alcohol as another abyss that could swallow her whole. Obviously Haymitch had jumped back in. It would be too easy to give up, and she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. She’d fight it.

None of them looked good that morning, though. Katniss in particular looked like she’d been crying all night. But they all woke up smartly enough when Coin told them just why she’d gathered them all together before the execution.

There was no choice to be made, in her opinion. Her hand instinctively went down to her still-flat stomach underneath the table. A few years ago she would have worried that this baby would be reaped. She wouldn’t inflict that anguish on anyone else’s kids, wouldn’t punish _anyone’s_ children for their parents’ sins. The Games had to stop.

Johanna obviously didn’t agree, going to the point of vengefully pointing out that Snow had a granddaughter of the proper age, and Annie’s heart sank. But just for a moment as everyone’s attention turned, she thought she saw Johanna look uncertain. Regret for words spoken in a moment of rage? Johanna’s jaw tightened, though, and Annie knew that even if she was perhaps rethinking her words already, she wouldn’t look weak by taking them back, especially when Enobaria immediately backed her.

So she voted “no”, and knew she would have no regrets or second thoughts about it. She voted for herself, not for Finnick’s sake. But her heart sank as Katniss finally voted “yes”.

Sensing the last opportunity to stop the madness, Peeta started furiously lecturing Haymitch, voice rising to a shout at some points. But Haymitch and Katniss seemed to shut everything and everybody else out, Haymitch watching Katniss with a careful expression. What was going through his head? Finally he spoke, and Annie had to close her eyes as he said gruffly, “I’m with the Mockingjay.”

Nobody stayed in the frigid air outside for long, given the sudden chaos of Katniss shooting President Coin. As they arrested Katniss and she heard Haymitch shouting furiously at Plutarch and the guards, the seething chaos tugged at the dark waters within her and she felt paralyzed and overwhelmed. Trying desperately to shut it out, she felt a hand on her arm. “Come on,” Johanna said. “Let’s get inside.”

“OK. But…we…we have to stop those Games, you know,” Annie said, shaking her head, because Coin had probably still passed the word of their vote on before the execution.

“Yeah, we will,” Johanna said, looking ashamed for a minute, and Annie felt the relief of knowing Johanna’s words had apparently been hasty, but hopefully her heart was in the right place anyway. “But this is turning into a riot. It’s gonna get ugly.”

Maybe the fact that Johanna thought of her safety, rather than staying there and indulging in the fight, said all that needed to be said. “Why are you doing this, anyway?” Finnick had told Annie that Johanna had wanted him, once, which seemed to make her kindness even weirder. She was still grateful for it, though. 

“For Finnick,” Johanna said softly, glancing at her briefly then looking away. “He loved you. That’s reason enough.” That was the second time that day she’d referred to Finnick, but this was the time Johanna proved she’d known Finnick’s heart well enough that she’d been his friend.

Across the city, before order was restored the next morning, another sixty-seven people died in the various riots. President Snow was another casualty. Annie couldn’t find it within her to be glad of that, she was just glad it was over. 

Brocade Paylor of Eight became a hastily installed president, though there were rumbles of discontent it was the votes of the former military commanders, rather than the people of Panem, that had decided her election. The Capitol Games were called off, much to everyone’s relief, given that their primary instigator was dead and one of the “yes” votes was somewhat negated by her pending trial for murder.

Maybe they were also cancelled in part because there was a far bigger spectacle on offer. The trial of Katniss Everdeen, the assassin of a president, was broadcast live to every household in Panem. Those that still had reliable electricity, anyway, and Annie wasn’t sure that was all that many.

Right now Annie felt like they were just marking time, detained in the Capitol until cleared to leave, unable to move forward just yet. It had been nearly two months since the Capitol fell, several weeks since the assassination and the riots. Haymitch was attentive and kind to her, but she could tell he poured all his energy into the task of saving Katniss Everdeen—for the third time.

She hadn’t seen him at the 74th Games, though Johanna admitted he’d been off-kilter there. But she’d seen how frazzled he looked during the Quell when he thought nobody was looking. This time he didn’t bother to hide it. After his one night of getting drunk, Annie didn’t catch a whiff of alcohol on him during the trial. He looked like he barely slept. True, he ate with them, though he usually ended up scribbling notes in his notebook, looking distracted, and the meal concluded with him pushing most of his plate to her and Johanna mumbling, “Annie’s gotta eat for two now.” But right now it was like the task consumed him to the point she worried he’d break himself in saving Katniss.

But one night, nearly six weeks into the trial, he didn’t even come home, and she knew that for well or ill, something had changed. She waited at the foot of the stairs the next morning, intent on catching him, knowing his schedule. He bounded down the stairs, obviously in a rush to get to the courtroom once again. How he found energy given how little he ate or slept she had no idea, although maybe her perspective was skewed given that she felt like she’d never been so hungry or so tired in her life. “Haymitch!”

He paused, turned to her. There was a momentary impatience, as if he’d forgotten that anything or anyone else existed, closely followed by a sharp expression of chagrin. Not at her, more like he was fed up with himself for having forgotten. “How are you? Is it the baby?” he asked anxiously. “I should have…sorry that it’s been…”

Annie raised a hand to stop his rambling apology. He’d done the best for her that he could right now. “The closing arguments are coming up in a few days. I just wanted to ask how it’s going with Katniss.” They’d been to a few sessions of the trial to show their support, but it was one thing listening to the testimony. Given that Haymitch was acting more or less as Katniss’ defense counsel, albeit with a trained Capitol lawyer sitting at the table to handle any legalese that came up, he was close enough to the heart of it. “I figure something must have happened that you were at it all night.”

“Kincaid, Rosen, Plutarch and me,” he named the Thirteen lawyer prosecuting Katniss for the murder of a Thirteen citizen, and the Capitol lawyer who was his official front, “finally did some wheeling and dealing last night.”

“Good or bad?” she asked him gently as he could.

“Good, I think,” he said with a sigh, stretching out his back as if now, when forced to pause, he could finally notice his aches. “We got Kincaid to agree to accept an insanity defense.”

She felt crushed, as cold inside as the snows outside, and suddenly she couldn’t look at him. The sense of betrayal was absurd but it was real all the same. “So you’re going to label her as crazy.” She heard the flatness of her tone, heard the words _crazy Annie poor mad girl never been quite right after her Games you know such a shame_ ringing in her ears, shoving them back only with an effort.

He heard it and obviously got it, from his long silence. “She killed Alma Coin in front of hundreds of witnesses, with thousands and thousands more watching it on national television. There’s no possibility of ‘not guilty’ here, Annie. So if being called crazy keeps her neck out of a noose,” he said quietly, “yes, I’ll do it.” He stepped in front of her and his voice was gruff but gentle. “Finn and Mags and me, we did it for you too. You remember.”

She couldn’t argue that, not without being a hypocrite. “Crazy” had been her security. It kept her from being dragged to the Capitol every year to mentor and to whore, kept her from being like Finnick, or Johanna, or Haymitch. She’d snapped and attacked her very first patron when she panicked. Finnick and Mags and Haymitch had been the ones to spin that situation, to weave the story that saved her life and got her out of the trap besides. _She’s crazy, she was too damaged to know what she was doing._ At the time she’d accepted it gratefully in her terror of the consequences. “I know,” she acknowledged. “But don’t ask me to be happy for it. 'Crazy' is a label that sticks.”

“You showed ‘em anyway,” he pointed out. “You loved him. You married him. She can still have a good life too.” At the reminder of Finnick, her heart twisted painfully, but he was right. “So long as she’s alive, there’s hope.”

“What are they going to do to her?”

“I’ll take care of her.”

It took her a moment to process that. “Not her mother?”

Haymitch shook his head, reaching up to tiredly rub his eyes. “Perulla can’t handle it,” he admitted frankly. “She told me that last night when I told her Katniss was getting released.” He looked at her, eyes tired but pleading. “Girl’s got nobody else. It’s gotta be me.” 

Of all people Annie appreciated the value of someone who cared and committed to be there through the worst of it, but she and Finnick had both been adults. They’d been able to be there for each other. She honestly wasn’t sure Haymitch could handle a teenage girl when he was so obviously faltering himself. He’d always bear the burden of being Katniss’ guardian, whereas Finnick had been more her equal, able to be her lover and support her in return. “Well, she’s welcome to come live wi…”

He smiled a peculiar, sad little smile. “Oh, I know you’d take her in. Hell, you might well be the best person for her. But that ain’t gonna happen. Kincaid demanded she go to Twelve. Somewhere she ‘won’t be a danger’ to everyone in her insanity, you know. Same reason they’ve kept her locked in isolation all these weeks. Really, it’s out of sight, out of mind. Nobody wants to see the poor crazy little Mockingjay.” His voice faltered at the end and she wondered just how bad Katniss was. They hadn’t allowed her any visitors, but as her lawyer he must have at least seen her, if not visited. Pretty bad, to judge from his tone, and suddenly she hurt for him most of all. He was facing another impossible task, and yet he did it. _He looks after us,_ Finnick had told her, and it seemed that was still the case.

Her answering smile was weary, seeing that the war’s end hadn’t meant the end of the ruin of more peoples’ lives. “Of course they don’t.” Moved by the impulse, she stepped forward and hugged him. “Thank you.” For all the people that perhaps hadn’t bothered to acknowledge him. He hesitated, looking confused, then hugged her briefly in turn and hurried away, as if he couldn’t bear even that much.

~~~~~~~~~~

The latest snow out on the hovercraft pad had half-melted into a thick, wet slush, and been trampled down further by shoes and boots. The heated runways and landing pads and walkways weren’t working, probably because of the rolling electricity issues as Five apparently still struggled with the power grid. So the former comfort and ease of pushing a button and vaporizing the snow wasn’t an option. Johanna watched out the window as a few workers in the bright neon uniforms of the Capitol Hoverport shoveled the snow and slush, struggling to clear the way.

“Well,” the voice came from behind her, soft and a bit gruff with uncertainty.

Haymitch Abernathy at a loss for words—a momentous occasion, she thought. She turned and saw him standing there in his thick winter coat. “Your ride?” she asked, nodding to the hovercraft waiting only for a shoveled walkway.

“Yeah. With the plea bargain in, they want her out of town quick as possible, I reckon.” His lips half-twitched into a tired smile. 

“Wanna trade? They can’t get enough of the tragic widow Odair,” Johanna replied. Hopefully it would help to get Annie out of this fucking shitheap and back to Four. Or maybe it would just stir up more bad memories given the lack of Finnick, who knew, but it couldn’t be worse than staying in the Capitol, could it? At least it would make the reporters work harder for it. She didn’t look forward to the day they found out Annie was pregnant, and she didn’t delude herself that they wouldn’t find out. But until then, she was protecting that secret as best she could. 

They stood there and eyed each other with the air of people who didn’t know quite what to say. That was new. They’d never minced words before, never been unable to keep up with each other and raise the stakes all the time and know they’d keep right on going. But this was different. This wasn’t goodbye for eleven months knowing she’d see him next summer for another round of Games and idiocy. She was bound for Four and he was bound for Twelve and maybe she wouldn’t see him again.

And it wasn’t the same for more reason than that. For just a moment, looking away and out into the winter flurries again, she imagined what it might be like, if he could have come to Four like they’d originally planned, that idea where he brought both kids with him and got all of them out of the depressing graveyard that was Twelve. She thought about the look on Finnick and Annie’s faces at their wedding, the way they must have looked after Annie’s rescue too when she was passed out and couldn’t see it. That look had been simply belonging, coming home. 

So she didn’t think about fucking him, or the excuses she’d make to him and herself to make it happen. Her mind went to the chill in the bedroom on cold winter nights, and the thought of waking up to someone else there. She thought about being not only physically warm from his presence but soul-warm too, comforted by knowing that if she woke in the night screaming that he would be there. She thought about knowing she’d never be alone again, of waking up in the morning and seeing him peacefully asleep there, knowing she belonged. _Home_.

Maybe that was stupid fantasy and it wouldn’t have worked anyway. But things had shifted between them in those weeks in Thirteen and the Capitol where they leaned on each other so much, and saw far deeper into each other than that ever had before. In that moment she realized if there was anyone she could have made it with, it would have been him. Even those few faint hints about going to Four together for Annie, she thought they’d both understood that perhaps along with looking after Annie as friends, they would be there for each other too. But maybe they couldn’t, maybe they’d have held on forever on the edge of that gap between friendship and a few desperate fucks, and something so much more, unable to make that leap. But it didn’t matter. Much as she mourned the chance, acknowledging it only far too late, it was gone. Katniss had made sure of it.

She shook her head, not wanting to look at him just yet, because she was half afraid that she’d see the same emotion on his face and then she couldn’t bear to leave. But she glanced up to see his reflection over her shoulder, his face darkly reflected against the winter sky. Her breath created misty puffs on the glass. People might be wondering why she was standing there with her nose practically pressed to the window, but at least then she didn’t have to look at him, or anyone else. She just wanted to leave and for people to stop staring at her. “Well, hey, looks like we all get to be unhappy in our ways, huh?”

“We’ve been through it already and we’ve survived. We can be strong for ‘em.” He had a point. They’d endured their losses long ago. Katniss’ sister, Finnick—those wounds were still fresh and bleeding.

It was how it was. “Yeah. Nice to be needed, at least,” she acknowledged. Even if it was clear Annie didn’t need a nursemaid, she obviously had needed a friend before, and she’d keep on needing one now. She’d lost her husband, apparently her family and Finnick’s were all dead, and she was having a kid. How the hell she’d borne up underneath all that in the months since the Quell, Johanna had no idea, but she had. Still, there was surviving and there was living. Johanna knew that as well as anyone ever could. And right after Finnick’s death, the three of them had pulled together tightly, as close as she and Haymitch had ever been with Finnick. Haymitch was now pulled by conflicting ties to go take care of the kids, so she’d stick with Annie, and make sure that she didn’t have to be the one suddenly left all alone. “And I’ll be sitting on my ass on a nice warm beach. Enjoy the cold, huh?”

“You won’t like the heat,” he said with confidence. Bastard knew her too well, especially after that jungle arena.

“But I like her more than I dislike the heat.” It surprised her to admit it so openly.

“That’s what matters.” She felt the touch of his hand on her shoulder, gentle as he waited to see if she’d shrug it off impatiently. When she didn’t, it settled with more pressure. “Phones ought to be working, so Beetee says, and they’ll lift the ban on calls between districts.”

“Good. Keep in touch.” Someone had to look out for him. She trusted Annie to do that for her, as her friend in turn. She didn’t trust Katniss, or Peeta if and when he came back, to return the favor for Haymitch.

“Take care of yourself, huh?” He squeezed briefly and then let go.

Now she looked back over her shoulder at him, her resolve firmly back in place. “Yeah. You too.” Better this way, a few simple words and accepting the way things were and had to be. At least she had a new friend to go home with now, rather than just the empty house back in Victors’ Glade, and some purpose to her life. But she’d feel the lack of both Finnick and Haymitch now, her oldest friends. She nodded outside where the lights of the hovercraft had flickered on. “Better go get your little Mockingjay and get her ready. Don’t want to miss your ride.”

~~~~~~~~~~

After he made Katniss eat a sandwich, seeing the hollowness of her cheeks, and put her to bed, he couldn’t help it. He started gathering up all the liquor he could find on the hovercraft, hating himself as he did it. But the thought of going back to Twelve, with the two of them as the only living things there, filled him with nothing but dread.

He couldn’t look after her like she needed, wasn’t like he could even be trusted to look after _himself_. Dead sister, boyfriend in the hospital, abandoned by her mother—it reminded him too damn much of himself with losing brother, girlfriend, and mother all together. The face looking back at him, bewildered and lost with dull and empty eyes, might as well have been a feminine version of his own youthful self. 

She’d lost everything. She couldn’t end up like him. But he didn’t know how the hell to stop it. And even as he told himself he was just stockpiling the liquor in case, that he’d try to avoid it, he knew the moment he was back in that empty house alone, he’d want to drink. He’d gotten too used to Annie and Johanna. They’d been what helped get him through the kids being in the hospital, helped get him through the trial.

Fuck, he wished he’d have been sober and clear-minded enough the night before Snow’s execution to listen to the girl. It was only the next day, when she said, _For Prim_ , that he clued in to something going awry. Prim Everdeen would never have voted for the Games. He thought he’d finally figured it out—it was Coin all along, and so he went along with her, saying he was with the Mockingjay. Not Katniss herself. She was just playing Coin’s expected role and so would he. They were buying time, that was all, and he was all ready to talk to her after the execution, start making plans.

But obviously the girl didn’t trust him enough then to believe he’d help her handle it, so she jumped the gun and assassinated Coin. Why would she trust him now?

“Well, see you tomorrow,” he said, hoisting his bag as they parted ways on the Victors’ Village green. 

Her whispered, “I doubt it,” struck deep. No, she didn’t trust him at all, though he couldn’t blame her. He watched her go. Their footprints in the shin-deep snow were the only sign of any living thing in Twelve. He looked at his dark house and cringed, because they had no electricity yet—the firebombs took down the whole grid. He knew the feeble glow of candlelight wouldn’t be enough to banish the darkness and all its monsters. So the clink of the bottles against each other as he trudged towards his front door was all the more reassuring.

He did his best. He rationed the alcohol because he was all she had. When he found her the next day lying there in her bed like a dead person, not moving and not responding, it was only the fact that she was still breathing that told him she was alive.

Two days later, much to his relief, Sae Vickers came back, and while Katniss didn’t exactly come to life, at least she let Sae feed her and the like, though she wouldn't allow a bath just yet. She hadn’t even allowed him that, much as he’d tried. He still checked in daily, but it was obvious his being there did nothing for her. So he went home and the bottles were still there in a neat row on his counter to keep him company. Best way possible to wash away yet another guilty failure. 

She allowed herself to survive, if not to live. He didn’t know how to help teach her that. He’d made a business out of just surviving. Best thing possible was to leave her care to someone Katniss trusted, and to pray that the boy eventually came back. 

He couldn’t help her, and she wouldn’t care if he drank his days away. Only the occasional phone call from Four varied his schedule, and hearing Johanna or Annie, hearing that they were doing well and knowing from the warmth in their voices they weren’t just lying to him, he was grateful. But every time he hung up the phone he wanted to drink even more.

~~~~~~~~~~

After the stale air of Thirteen and the chilly autumn and snowy winter of the Capitol, Four’s cool, damp winter felt wonderful to Annie. “Ugh,” Johanna said crossly, “it’s that wet cold again. Give me below freezing but dry any day.”

Annie laughed, exhilarated at the feeling of being home again, even as she tried to push away the pang of knowing everyone else she’d loved was gone. They would make this home again, she was determined. “Then come to my house and I’ll make you some tea.”

Sitting in the kitchen with her hands wrapped around a warm mug of tea, she found memories of Finnick seeping in. Maybe it was a good thing they’d never moved in together—it would have caused too many questions then and there would be too many echoes of him now. She wasn’t sure she could have handled going by all his things in their bedroom. It had been bad enough in Thirteen, but at least in the Capitol there were things to focus on, Haymitch to help look after, but now it hit her with the weight of a full oyster dredge slamming down on deck.

Suddenly she was crying. “Hey,” Johanna said, “hey, what’s…”

“He’s never coming back, and I’ve still got a whole house of his further down the row,” Annie choked out, “and I can’t deal with…”

“You tell me if there’s anything you want from his house and I’ll get it,” Johanna said, reaching a callused hand out and gripping Annie’s snot-sticky one.

Annie nodded, grateful for that. There were a few things of his she’d like to have, but walking into that house and faced with nothing but reminders of Finnick would have overwhelmed her. “How long did it take you to deal with your family’s things?”

Johanna gave an uncomfortable laugh. “Yeah, uh…still haven’t. I’m not exactly the best role model.”

The silence stretched between them uncomfortably at that. “There’s lots of empty rooms here,” Annie said, “or else—we never did get to twelve victors here in the Bayou. You can have a place of your own.” She didn’t know whether Johanna would prefer to have someone near and feel like she belonged, or have some place to call her own and some privacy when she wanted. “Either way, you’re always welcome over here, and I figure we might as well cook at my place and all. I’ve got all the utensils and pots and pans and the like. The other houses won’t.”

“I’ll probably stay here until I can see about some furniture,” Johanna said, glancing at her as if she wasn’t quite sure whether to believe she really was welcome.

“Good.” Annie smiled at her. “And if you think the winter’s fun, wait until the summer humidity.” Johanna groaned, rolling her eyes.

Apparently her new neighbor’s idea of “furniture” involved bringing some stuff over after a brief trip back to Seven, although when she saw the bedroom set and learned it was heirloom furniture that her family had carved together and passed down, Annie couldn’t argue with that. The cherrywood was beautifully worked. For someone from Four, she was familiar with the quality of Seven’s handmade furniture. They’d had it in her parents’ hotel, because Capitol tourists had expected more than just the mass-produced stuff from Seven factories. The stuff made in One was too expensive, only luxury woods and made only for the Capitol market—or at least it had been.

But at least she had enough perspective to exclaim over the carvings, and she saw Johanna’s pleased smile at that. The days were good ones, especially as she moved beyond the period of fatigue and nausea and both her energy and appetite returned with a vengeance. Johanna kept her company, helped paint the baby’s nursery, taught Annie how to knit. Soon enough Baby Odair had more hats and booties than he or she could probably ever wear, but it kept Annie’s mind busy.

In turn Annie teased her about her northern avoidance for spicy foods, taught her to love gumbo and how to cook it, how to make beignets. Swapping recipes one day as they made jambalaya and a blackberry cake, it was almost like having her sister Unalla back again—just another Capitol casualty during the war. If only they’d known the rebellion was happening, she and Finnick could have warned their families, but it was too late. Hearing Johanna whistling, carried helplessly in the current of memories of Unalla, she shut her eyes for a minute and tried to center herself. “I am Annie Odair. I’m twenty-thr—no, twenty-four,” as of January, “years old,” she told herself softly.

“What’s that?” Johanna said, stopping her whistling. “You OK?”

She opened her eyes, not done yet with the recitation but feeling grounded enough to quit. “I’ll be OK,” she said.

“Oh, you’re doing that thing the shrink had us do,” Johanna said, greasing the baking tin with a smear of butter. Annie remembered Johanna had spent her fair share of time with the psychiatrist as well.

Annie looked over her shoulder at Johanna. “Did it work for you?”

Johanna’s face twisted for a moment in pain, but then she gave a quick and nonchalant shrug. “It was always pretty short, really. ‘I am Johanna Mason. I’m twenty-six years old. I survived two fucking Hunger Games now.’ Done.”

Annie had always had things to add to that—sister, daughter, wife—but bereft of those people now in her life, she sympathized with Johanna. “You’re my friend,” she said softly, reaching for the spoon and adding a pinch of cumin to the jambalaya. “You can always say that.” Deliberately, she turned to the stove to stir, sensing Johanna might not want to be seen just then.

“Thanks,” Johanna said, with an odd tightness to her tone that told Annie she was struggling to keep her voice even.

She lived what seemed like a dual existence. The days were good, full of companionship and even laughter. The nights were when she cried herself to sleep and dreamed, but Johanna couldn’t help that. Only time might do it, but too many days Annie thought that could never happen. She curled up around her growing belly, mourning Finnick. At the Quell, Chaff had told her that sometimes he felt the ache of his missing hand still. Every night Annie still felt the ache of the missing half of her soul, but every morning she tried to greet it as a new day, and one day closer to maybe finding a way to carry on. She didn’t see how, but it had to happen eventually.

One morning shortly after she felt the first ripples of the baby kicking, Johanna delivered a cradle when she came along for breakfast. “Been working on it evenings,” she admitted, as Annie touched the satiny-soft wood with a sense of wonder, running her fingertips over the carving of seashells and intertwined tendrils of seaweed. “Figured I might as well contribute something, and well, back in Seven, the family would make one…”

Maybe Johanna needed something to fill her lonely nights just as much as Annie did, and the gesture told her plenty. “Well, you’re family, you’re the baby’s aunt, aren’t you?” she said. _You’re my sister now._ Johanna’s eyebrows shot up at that, but then she recovered and grinned. 

“Damn straight. Someone’s gotta teach this kid all the fun ways to misbehave.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Leaning on the support post of the porch, looking at the two of them, hearing the laughter of two kids in love drifting over on the midsummer breeze, Haymitch was glad of that. It wouldn’t be easy, but the two of them would get through it by and by, having each other again to lean on.

With Peeta come on back to Twelve, Katniss had apparently tended up her inner fire from the ashes. He’d done for Katniss what Haymitch and even Sae couldn’t, and he looked at the two of them with a sense of relief. 

But much as the country thought of _The Girl on Fire_ , at the thought of something brightly burning, his thoughts readily turned first to another woman, another fierce flame. After all, wood burned just as readily as coal, didn’t it? She’d burned hot enough even to warm one foolish old man and make him start to want things again. He hadn’t realized it then, cloaking it in denial as he had, trusting that they’d figure it out later. Maybe it had been a little messed up, no fairy-tale idea. But he’d known by the end that they were coming to rely on each other in a way that was different than from before the Quell. Things had shifted enough for him to think perhaps they could have shifted more, away from the Games and the war. But deprived of that now, the lack hit him in that raw, awful, insistent way that was like the gnawing of hunger.

He’d known a hunger for food and he’d known loneliness, and so he knew in both cases, eventually the hunger turned to pure starvation and the pangs died down. The pain left and all that was left was the weakness, the hollowness. 

Loneliness didn’t kill, though, unlike starvation. But at least he had the liquor to deal with it, until the last embers died down for lack of anything to sustain them, and then to make him forget the emptiness within where it had all gone dark again.

All he had right now was memories, all the dead to put in that book of Katniss’ that they were finishing up. It was good to put the stories of those kids to paper and say that they had mattered. The Capitol would never have let him do that before. But at the same time, each day he wandered home, all he could think was that he still only kept company with the dead.

Well, the dead, some geese, and a lot of liquor, anyway.

The phone rang the next morning and he answered, eating some toast and trying to promise himself he wouldn’t touch the liquor before noon. He’d probably fail today, as he failed almost every day. “Abernathy.” He’d learned that there were enough wrong numbers meant for Katniss and Peeta sent to his phone that it was better to disappoint them right away. 

“Mason,” there came the immediate, snarky answer.

“Good to know we haven’t forgotten our names yet,” he replied, cramming the last of the toast in his mouth and licking a trace of blueberry jam off his fingers. “What’s the word from Four?”

“Like being in a fucking furnace.” _Or maybe a jungle encircled by a forcefield._ But she would never admit that. “The baby’s here.”

Now that caught his attention—finally some good news. “And?”

Johanna sounded tired, even over the phone, but jubilant all the same. “Rough labor. But Annie pulled through like a champ.” The pride was obvious in her voice. “The baby’s OK too.”

“Boy or girl?” he prompted her, rolling his eyes. He knew there were bets out on that, the name, and everything—the tragic posthumous child of Finnick Odair was a hot news topic.

“Boy.”

Deciding to risk it, he said, “Tell me she’s not naming him Finnick.”

“No. He’s Dylan. And he’s got her hair.” He nodded in relief at that. Maybe it would be easier for her to not look at the boy and see only a tiny echo of Finnick in every way.

“Newscasters there?”

“Thick as maggots on a five-day corpse,” she assured him. “I’ve had a lot of fun telling them to fuck off.”

“I’ll just bet you have.” They talked for a little while longer and he let himself imagine them—Annie, slim and black-haired, and Johanna with her curves and brown hair, together with Annie’s son. She sounded happy, happier than he could have imagined during those strained days of autumn and winter. _Happier than I could have managed._ When he hung up again, he reached for the bottle. It was before noon, true, but he took a celebratory drink for the birth of Dylan Odair—and then kept going.

~~~~~~~~~~

“It never fails to amaze me,” Johanna said, sitting on the sand and eyeing the boardwalk to make sure no reporters were going to bother them today, “that we’re in the district with all the freaks that love water, and we both just sit here.” She nodded towards the distant ebb and surge of the water on the sand. Even without the water torture, she wasn’t sure she’d have wanted to go swimming again in saltwater in a hurry after the arena.

As was, the summer heat here still set her on edge with too many reminders, and she wanted nothing more than to find somewhere cool with refreshing breezes rather than this constant steamy, butter-thick air. A Four summer made her utterly miserable and it probably always would. Annie kept offering her cold tea for it, with enough sugar that Johanna felt like her teeth would melt on contact, so she’d had to make her own jar of it.

Annie turned to Dylan’s carrier, covering him carefully from the fierce August heat so he wouldn’t burn while he napped. He was two weeks old now and already sleeping better than Johanna had expected. “Well,” she said with some humor, “at least we can ignore the water together.”

Funny how things worked out in life—of all the friends she could have made, Annie Odair would have been the last one Johanna expected. And yet, she got it. After her arena, she knew about a fear of water. She even knew about losing it and retreating inside her mind, although at least Annie had waited until she was in the arena to get overwhelmed by it. Johanna had always resented her a little for it, because Annie’s breaks with reality had gotten her awkward sympathy and being ignored whereas it had just landed her a reputation as a violent bitch and invited further sadism on her.

She couldn’t say exactly how Annie let on that she knew Johanna’s “act” hadn’t been an act, but she was grateful. She’d never even told Finnick that, didn’t know if he suspected. She thought Haymitch might, from how he’d acted around her sometimes.

It was good to have someone who quietly understood and just accepted it anyway. Sometimes she thought that meant Annie was even a closer friend to her than Finnick had been though she felt guilty and traitorous immediately at that, like she was rejecting him. “Yeah,” she said, moved to a reluctant smile. “At least we’ve got that.” It was good to see Annie out of the house. The last two weeks had been hectic with a newborn, and this was the first break either of them had really had. 

She nodded down at Dylan, seeing the curve of chubby cheek, the fleecy wisps of black hair. “Clinic called, by the way. Want to schedule his one-month checkup.” The new hospital was on the eastern edge of the district center, along a bend of the Big River, the one that started all the way up in Seven, at a little lake a bit west of the winter town. It was comfortingly familiar to see that and know that it was water that had made its way down from the pine forests. “You want to go there, or should we ask someone to come out here?” They’d sent someone to Victors’ Bayou for the birth.

“Maybe we should go,” Annie answered, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. “It’ll be good to get out.”

“Might risk a whole lot of reporters, though,” Johanna pointed out. “And if I see Perulla Everdeen there, I really might knock her fucking teeth in.” She knew from Haymitch that Katniss’ mother had moved to Four to help open the hospital. 

“Oh?”

She gave a derisive, angry snort. “I’d rather end up bleeding in the street than get help from a woman who’ll look after anyone but her own kid, and who abandons them expecting someone else to pick up her slack.”

“You don’t know what it’s like for her,” Annie pointed out. She reached down, adjusting Dylan’s blanket, as if in need of reassurance that he was still there.

She felt like she’d been kicked. _You don’t know what it’s like._ Just because she’d never been married or had a child, she couldn’t know anything? “I’ve lost plenty of people and I had to find a way to carry on,” she said between her teeth. “I didn’t _get_ the option to quit.” She never would have quit, if she'd had anyone left. 

“I only meant,” Annie answered, refusing to rise to the bait and argue, and sometimes her calm, unruffled demeanor annoyed Johanna, “that you can’t know how anyone else deals with their problems. And how much they can handle. We all cope differently, you know?”

“Fine,” she said, grudgingly willing to acknowledge that much. “But I sure as hell didn’t dump my problems on someone even worse off than me.” That was the real source of it, she had to admit. Perulla Everdeen had thrown up her hands and quit, knowing Haymitch would pick up after her, never mind that he was in no shape to do it. Every time she talked to him on the phone she thought his voice sounded either drunk or tiredly flat, and it scared the hell out of her. It was like listening to him fade bit by bit, and she found it damn hard to absolve either Katniss or her mother for binding him in that situation—funny how they were just alike, mom and daughter, both expecting other people to clean up their messes, and then ignoring those people when they did it. Maybe she could try to understand as Annie urged, but she knew right now she couldn’t forgive, not until she knew he was OK too.

“So call Haymitch,” Annie said with a half-shrug. “Ask him to come and visit a while—it’d be nice to see him again, and for him to meet Dylan. I don’t imagine Katniss actually needs constant supervision, and it sounds like she and Peeta are just fine. I imagine he could do with some time away from Twelve anyway.”

With a hot rush of embarrassment making her sun-kissed cheeks even hotter, Johanna wondered if Annie was on to her. “Maybe you ought to ask.” Annie would sell it to him better. She had a knack for that kind of thing.

“Fine. I’ll ask him if you agree that we can take Dylan to the clinic, and if you’ll try to be civil to Perulla Everdeen if we see her there. I’d rather not alienate the hospital. We might need them in the future.”

“Done,” Johanna said, admitting privately that access to good medical care was a hell of a lot better than it had been in the past and it was probably smart to not jeopardize that, but trying to not sound too grumpy about it.

~~~~~~~~~

He’d been relieved to get the offer from Annie to come for a visit—it was more and more abundantly clear to him that District Twelve held no place for him in it. The kids were fine, and the rebuilt district still carried enough of the ghost of the old to make things uncomfortable. Every time he went out and saw new Seam faces returning home, and their awkwardness with the man who’d lived among them but not as one of them, the divide stood clear as day all over again.

Annie hugged him on arrival, though not too tightly. That was proof enough that she was a victor, knowing that sense of boundaries. “Good to see you again,” she told him, and he looked her over. It had been sheer will that carried her through last fall and winter after Finnick’s death. He wouldn’t say she looked radiantly happy—she was still grieving a husband and dealing with a newborn. But she looked strong, capable, solidly in her element. Her green eyes were calmer. What wounds remained had retreated below the surface. He’d be a damn fool if he pretended they were entirely gone, though. But compared to him nine months into mourning his family, she obviously had her shit far more together.

Johanna surprised him with how good she looked, even if he should have expected it after hearing the edge of contentment in her voice on the phone. Her golden skin glowed from being outside, and her brown hair had grown out almost to her ears now, liberally sun-streaked with copper and gold. She’d gained back the weight she’d lost in captivity, and then a bit more besides—it looked good on her, filled out the curves of her body. There was still that fierce intensity to her, but the palpable sense of warning that to get too close too quickly would be answered with attack had receded. She was formidable, but probably not frightening to people any longer.

Seeing her just underscored how things had changed. She’d done well and he’d gone totally to hell again. Maybe last fall, even last winter, they’d entertained a few thoughts of things after all the fallout was finished and they could go somewhere, presumably still to Four with Annie. Plans had changed and they’d both changed too, but in opposite directions. Looking at her, he looked back on those faint hopes of last year and felt like an idiot for how impossible that dream had really been.

Meeting baby Dylan didn’t help at all either. He was a cute kid, and Haymitch really was relieved he had Annie’s black hair. But standing there looking down at Finnick’s son in his cradle, obviously handmade by Johanna and seeing mother and aunt standing there beaming with pride, he only knew how wrong his own presence was. There was a man that should have been there rather than Haymitch Abernathy—a far better one.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” Annie said meaningfully as she tucked the stuffed toy bear he’d brought for the baby on the shelf. The kid was too young for it, he could see that now.

“Thanks,” he said, forcing himself to smile at both of them, though he felt the panic of knowing what they were doing. He’d come here maybe hoping to find they had some use for him. Quickly enough he saw they didn’t. The women had teamed up and clearly had everything covered here with formidable efficiency. The two of them had pulled together as friends and family, and he’d missed whatever chance he had to be a part of that—Katniss and Peeta had also shut him out with their new intimacy from which he was forever excluded. As for Dylan, the kid needed his father, not him. Haymitch didn’t know the first damn thing about babies, and who the hell wanted him around a helpless kid anyway? He didn’t exactly have a great track record in caring for other peoples’ kids. 

Not much place in the world for him, it seemed, and Annie’s kindness smacked of a loathsome pity. He didn’t want a place offered to him as a pitiful old man that nobody really wanted, worthless and useless. But that felt like the reality. _Hey, not even like my last two employers can give me a good reference. Although at least I only was the leader in deposing one of them._

They put him to stay in Johanna’s house, which made him feel more like an intruder. After dinner he went out walking, knowing he wouldn’t sleep, and to his vast relief, he found a dockside bar open for business. The taste of Four rum was familiar to him from years in Mentor Central, and nobody bothered him as he sat on a stool and drank purposefully, though not so much that he couldn’t walk back home and wake up in the morning. He couldn’t have Annie and Johanna know about the drinking.

~~~~~~~~~~

“He’s still drinking,” Johanna reported curtly, four days after Haymitch had arrived. “Comes back in at all hours. Barely sleeps.”

Annie sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “He doesn’t seem too happy to be here.” He was polite, always offering to help where he could, but compared to the gruff kindness he’d shown her last year, there was a sense of wariness in him, a kind of distraction as well. It was like he’d put up a forcefield between himself and everyone else.

“I don’t know,” Johanna acknowledged with a mutter, scraping butter onto the breakfast toast. “It’s not like he’s missing Twelve.”

“Sorry I’m late,” Haymitch said. As usual, it was his voice rather than his quiet footsteps that announced him. For a solidly built man, he could move disconcertingly silently. “Didn’t sleep so well last night.”

Fine, if they were going to play to this fiction, she’d go with it, though maybe it wasn’t all lies. Chances were he really did have nightmares as well. Mags had warned her if he was asleep on his couch in the lounge of Mentor Central, catching a nap before returning to his station, to not abruptly wake him up, and to ignore any noises she heard coming from there in general. At the time she’d figured it was the lounge’s notorious reputation as a spot for a quickie between victors, but maybe that hadn’t been all that Mags meant. “It’s all right, you know,” she tried to tell him as she moved past him, carrying the coffeepot to the table. She’d consoled Finnick plenty during his own nightmares, and he’d returned the favor. Maybe Johanna didn’t hold her tight, but they’d found a way to mend that wound in each other, and the long nights and games of checkers and knitting and any other number of things had been a sanity-saver for both of them. “It’s not like we haven’t dealt with nightmares ourse—“ 

He turned on her swiftly, one quick deft spin on his heel and he was immediately right in her face, close enough to either kiss or kill. He’d brushed his teeth, so it was the scent of mint rather than cheap rum fumes washed over her. His eyes had gone hard, a merciless flat steely grey that reminded her of the bayou in winter. It was so easy to forget sometimes what they all were. But right there he wasn’t a middle-aged man by turns snarky and awkward. She saw the killer in him and in perceiving the threat suddenly her fingers itched for her spear and she wanted to attack first. “I won’t be your damn burden,” he snarled at her, jaw tense and his chin defiantly tipped up as he stared her down. “Or anyone’s.”

Then the rage faded and a flicker of alarm and apology replaced it as he stepped back hastily, hands up as if to fend something off. Still trying to gather herself up and recover, Annie noticed Johanna stepping in front of her with surprise, her shoulders squared. “Then go ahead and get your things packed. Run away, old man,” Johanna told him calmly, as Annie moved to stand beside her. “It won’t be the first time you left both of us behind, would it?”

Haymitch looked like she’d struck him, but there was something else unreadable there—something Annie would almost have termed relief, but that couldn’t be. She remembered the desperate look on his face as the Peacekeepers pulled her back. “I did what I had to do, dammit,” he mumbled.

“Yeah. But you left us, and that means you still owe us, don’t you?” Johanna took a step towards him, demanding harshly, “ _Don’t you?_ ”

He looked at both of them with such a strange mix of relief and guilt that it hurt Annie to see it. “Yeah,” he finally rasped, nodding. “Fine.” He turned to leave and instinctively Annie went to go after him, to try to soften the terrible pain she’d seen there. What the hell was Johanna thinking anyway? The few victors that were left needed to not tear into each other, and it was clear he had more than enough wounds to deal with already without taking another one from a friend. 

But Johanna grabbed her arm, holding her back, and as Annie looked over at him, Johanna shook her head. Once Haymitch was out of earshot, Johanna said, “Let it go. This is what he needs right now. If he thinks he owes us, he’ll feel like he can stay. You saw—you try to play soft with him, he’s going to hate himself for being your charity case.” Finally she let go of Annie’s arm.

“Wonderful. And when exactly do we let him off the hook for this supposed debt that doesn’t even exist?” Annie protested, not liking holding him here with a sense of guilt.

“Until he can accept that you don’t pity him,” Johanna replied, glancing away and stuffing her hands in her pockets. She grimaced for a moment. “You knew Finnick better than I ever did. Just accept that I know Haymitch better than you, huh? You have no family and all you get is people telling you what you’re worth, you forget what it’s like to just belong. And he’s done that shit even longer than me.” She gave Annie a wry smile, rubbing the back of her neck, obviously uncomfortable trying to articulate it. “It took me a few months to get past the excuse of just coming here for Finnick’s sake. I had to get to know you. Had to relearn what it was like to belong somewhere, figure out how to accept that maybe you weren’t just going to let me stay because you needed help. May take him longer, he’s pretty fucking stubborn.”

She still didn’t like it, but maybe she could understand that sense of stubborn pride, and wanting to belong and to be wanted. She too knew what it was like to be the object of pity. “All right.” She couldn’t resist giving Johanna a conspirator’s grin, grateful that she’d been here all these months. Solitude would have been far too much, so she’d gotten at least as much out of it as Johanna had. “But between the two of us, it ought to take only _half_ as long, right?”

~~~~~~~~~~

Much as she wanted some of the bacon she’d been frying up, that had to wait. Johanna chased after Haymitch first, glad that matters had come to a head at least. Longer-legged as he was, and with his head start, she didn’t catch him until the spit of marshy land that was Turnagain Point, where the bayou ended its serpentine turns and emptied into the wide expanse of the bay.

He waited as she approached, arms folded over his chest. She didn’t waste time. “You want to stay here,” Johanna told him bluntly as the raw winds howled around the point, “especially around a little kid like Dylan—you need to put the rum away. You know it.”

“Oh, please, doesn’t every kid need an embarrassing drunken uncle?” he shot back, though his downcast eyes didn’t match his attempt at a nonchalant grin as he idly kicked at a broken shell.

Personally she’d like to kick Katniss and Peeta’s asses for being so caught up in each other that they ignored him, let him slip right back into his drinking and isolation. If only he’d come with her to Four in the first place, there wouldn’t be over six months of new damage to undo. Comparing herself to him, it was painfully obvious how she’d grown in those months with someone like Annie as support, while he’d been left alone to wither and even regress. It felt like he'd given up on himself and it hit her with a weird pang of protectiveness—all those years he’d been the one trying to look after her, keep her safe as much as he could. “Annie doesn’t know you like I do. She doesn’t see it. And I already know you’re keeping it to at night, you’re trying to keep it away from the kid.” He was trying that much. Or more likely he was trying to keep it away from her and Annie, but she wasn’t going to fling that in his face, or tell him that Annie knew as well. 

“Doing my best,” he muttered. “I mean, it’s either booze or sleep syrup or keeping you up half the night with me hollering, right?”

She hit him up pretty brutally, knowing he’d sooner die than be pitied and handled with kid gloves. “Well, either you quit or your liver’s gonna give out someday. Then you’ll die slow and it’ll be on me or Annie to look after you because you won’t be able to take care of yourself. You’ll be too damn sick. Not to mention it won’t be great for the kid to watch it happen. You don’t want to be a burden? Don’t put that shit on us.”

“Drying me out didn’t take the first two times, Johanna,” he told her, though the way he didn’t quite meet her eyes spoke plenty about his sense of shame in his drinking keeping up without the pressure of the Games as an excuse, “you’re smart enough to do the math—what makes you think a third time will do it?”

“Because I’m not Peeta and I’m not Coin—they both decided that you might fuck up their precious plans, so they had the right to just go ahead and force you to do it against your will. I’m here and I’m _asking_ you to want to do this, you sorry bastard,” and she looked at him defiantly, willing him to see it if only he would look up.

“Asking me to actually want to half-kill myself is a tall order, now, and really, all this fuss for me—I’ve gotten my share of compliments from the patrons, but I’m really not _that_ good a fuck, darlin’, now am I?” The quickly adopted cover of a wry smirk and the self-deprecation didn’t quite match his initially stunned expression at her asking. Having a choice—it sounded so simple, but how many times in their lives had they actually had one? 

He’d never had anyone willing to step in and fight for him, and prove that his life mattered for its own worth, not merely as a tool or a bargaining chip. The kids probably thought they were doing him a favor by not interfering, but the fact they were just willing to let him go to hell like this made her all the more determined to at least try—if he turned her away, that too would be his choice. 

“So maybe we want to stick around and have you there as long as we can…maybe you’re worth it to us.” She couldn’t quite say _me_ rather than _us_. Not yet. But now he did look right at her, and from the way his grey eyes went wide, even with as tired and bloodshot as they were, she thought nobody had ever told him that. She could make him do it, badger and guilt and harangue, and much as he hated himself for the drinking, she knew she would win—but in breaking him again, she’d make him hate himself more and probably resent her. It had to be his choice in return, to say that maybe what they had to offer him with a place to belong and a new family after the one he’d lost was worth more to him than the booze, or it was worthless.

He wasn’t beautiful in the common way of fresh-faced, clean-cut youth. His dark hair had grown back out from that horrible Thirteen military cut into a riot of curls that barely avoided shagginess, and over the last year he'd gotten a few distinct traces of silver besides. Sometimes when he was particularly tired or stressed, his normally quick step slowed, and she'd see the lines from years of strain traced across his face like wood grain. But she’d had more than enough of artifice and shallow bullshit in her life. She’d been fucked by her share of carefully groomed and surgically altered freaks that fetishized youth. Even Finnick, beautiful as he was, hadn’t ever wanted her as more than his friend. It was Annie and Haymitch, with all their own flaws and burdens, who'd stood by her by turns when she had nobody else. So she was tired of beauty. It could be crushed and destroyed. It didn’t last and it hadn’t ever done a fucking thing for her anyway.

But when she looked at him now, looking beyond a pleasantly-featured man now on the far side of forty, she could see the steel in him that he’d hidden underneath the dissolution and despair. He’d go to any lengths for the people he loved and fight for them with all his ability, until he won or it killed him. Maybe all he needed was someone to be patient with him, to protect him for once, to tell him to turn that formidable will and caring towards his own salvation because his life was worth it. 

Maybe she wasn’t ready yet for that “I need you” rather than “We need you”, and to tell him that it wasn’t just about Dylan Odair, that she didn’t really want to watch him slowly kill himself either. But as he looked at her, Johanna thought he understood it anyway, and that he also felt the tension of a thread between them that apparently hadn’t been snapped asunder when he left for Twelve and she left for Four, and it scared her even as it enticed her. 

There were no guarantees, but now the possibility existed. This was the first step, wasn’t it? If he could believe in the notion of a future that wasn’t just an endless cycle of endured days and nights, maybe, just maybe, there could be a place for her in it. 

Peeta and Coin had both dumped him to suffer through it alone and in doing so, told him with their contempt that it was entirely his problem. She remembered that he’d been there for her in Thirteen the most of anyone, even with as hard as Coin ran him. Even though it had been hard to bear at the time with him seeing her so weak and vulnerable, especially after she failed the test on the Block, she could look back on it now and be grateful that someone cared enough to make time for her, and let her know they wanted her to get better. She remembered his hands on her skin, and the urgency and heat—yeah, it had been desperate fucking just to feel alive and not alone, but it was more than they’d allowed themselves in so long, and she thought they’d been on the cusp of something more, given time. She’d had her share of time to think about things in those months apart. Whatever happened—or didn’t—he ought to be in the world as long as possible to try to make up for all the shitty years he’d lost. 

But she couldn’t bear the burden of hope for both of them. The future was too damn frightening if he wasn’t going to step into it with both feet alongside her. “If you don’t want Annie taking care of you while you’re drying out, that’s fine, I’ll tell her I’ve got it.” She could imagine he’d be less comfortable with Annie, who still didn’t know Haymitch like she did. He’d come to know her and like her better in time. “But I’ll stick around until you’re OK.” 

He looked surprised, a little embarrassed. But he nodded, and for once he didn’t look away.

~~~~~~~~~~

It was a fretful night and day with Dylan, one that seemed to have no specific cause that she could determine. Her mama would have just said he’d determined to be contrary, for whatever reason. By the time she finally got him put down for a nap, utter exhaustion seemed to have soaked into Annie’s bones. She knew she must look a fright with her hair straggling out in a rat’s nest, her shirt stained with milk and spit-up.

She hadn’t seen Johanna all day either. When Johanna finally showed up, long past lunch, she looked like she’d been dragged through a knothole backwards herself. Following Johanna as she trudged into the kitchen, Annie spared a moment of gratitude that her friend didn’t even spare a glance for the disaster area it had become. Grabbing a packet of crackers, Johanna plunked down into the chair with a heavy sigh, legs stretched out in front of her. She looked over at Annie. “You look like shit,” she observed, blunt as a hammer as usual.

“Dylan’s been a trial today,” she admitted, leaning back in her chair with a sigh and reaching over for some of the crackers herself. She’d missed breakfast. “Where’s Haymitch anyway?” She hadn’t even realized he was gone either.

Johanna chewed slowly and then answered, “Right now? Probably doing what he’s been doing all night and all day—thrashing around and screaming at things that aren’t there. Puking occasionally.” Annie would have claimed her tone was blasé, even nonchalant, except that she heard the rusty note to it that spoke of sheer fatigue. Leaning her cheek on her fist, Johanna shook her head, giving Annie a look of angry misery. “I shouldn’t have left him. I _told_ him I wouldn’t. But I just needed a few minutes to clear my mind, and some food…I didn’t know it would be so…”

Annie stared at her, not understanding it—what was wrong with Haymitch that he was that delirious? “Would you mind backing it up a few steps?” 

“He’s going off the booze.” Johanna reached for another cracker. “Again. But at least it’s by choice this time. I _asked_. I didn’t make him,” she snapped with defiance. She shook her head. “Finn tried to tell me just how bad it was when Coin dried him out. I thought he was exaggerating.” She chewed, swallowed. “I thought maybe he was going to die a couple times during the night.” There was a flicker of pain in her expression at that.

“You didn’t come ask me for help?”

Johanna answered that with a weary snort. “I told him I’d handle it. I know him.” There was that ironclad confidence once again. “You weren’t there in the Capitol those years to see when he was at his worst. He still wants to keep your good opinion.”

“Well he’s not going to get it if he’s dead,” Annie pointed out with exasperation, seeing what a state Johanna was in, irritated she’d felt like she had to face it alone. “Or if you run yourself into the ground. You help with Dylan, of course I’ll help you, and Haymitch is my friend too, you know.” Maybe she hadn’t known him for ten years, but she wouldn’t forget the period before the Quell, and after losing Finnick, when he’d been kind to her.

“Are we equating Haymitch to a cranky infant now?” Suddenly Johanna’s face lit up with a wicked kind of glee. “Actually, that may not be that far off sometimes…”

The barrier had been breached with that and Johanna admitted, “I'm hoping he's past the worst. He’s still freaking out occasionally but it’s winding down. He's not...” Her breath hitched raggedly at the memory of whatever horrible scene she'd had to watch already. Annie wouldn't let her or Haymitch endure that alone, so when Johanna went back next door, Annie followed her. Meanwhile, her previous suspicion, given how awkward and touchy Johanna was about the subject of Haymitch, bloomed into full-blown certainty. Haymitch had put himself through this ordeal simply because Johanna asked him, and obviously, watching the man she loved suffering was far harder than Johanna expected. A memory of Finnick screaming desperately for her with jabberjays swarming him crowded her mind, leaving her breathless with the helplessness and fear she'd felt watching him from Mentor Central. She pushed it back only with supreme effort, unwilling to go away inside and let her friends and her son down here in the present.

When they got to Haymitch’s room, Annie saw first that he hadn’t yet bothered to unpack, his bag lying open at the foot of the bed. Johanna had opened the curtains and the window, letting in the sunlight and the summer breeze. She imagined that was better than being shut up in the stifling dark. Considering Haymitch was stripped down to his plain white undershorts and undershirt, and he’d thrown off the covers and was currently soaked with sweat, the breeze probably helped. So did the towels underneath him.

Not to mention it helped the smell. A grown man soaked with sweat would have been one thing, but there was something sharp and acrid. For a woman who’d gotten used in the last weeks to changing baby diapers and the reek of milky stools, she wasn’t fazed, but the smell was familiar. “It smells kind of like piss and bleach,” Johanna put it bluntly. “But it’s actually the sweat. He told me to put the towels down. I’ve changed them once already.” She chewed her lip, shooting the trembling Haymitch a look that couldn't quite hide a hint of tenderness mingled with the fierce anxiety. “Nothing to do but wait it out, try to keep water in him. Cover him up when he’s shivering.”

“I’ve got it for a little while,” Annie told her. “Go get some lunch.” As was she felt dead on her feet and she wondered if she could get away with a nap later, Dylan permitting.

Staring at Haymitch for another long moment, Johanna nodded and left. Moving closer, Annie saw the water pitcher was empty, so she figured she’d go fill it. As limply as he lay there, like a man half-dead who didn’t have any energy left in his body, Annie was surprised to hear a soft croak of, “Briar?” Startled, her eyes flew to his face and saw that he was looking back at her, though his eyes were wide and not focusing correctly, not really seeing _her_ , compared to his usual sharp gaze. His eyes slid shut again like even that was too much of an effort as he hitched in on himself, huddling up against what looked like a racking spasm of pain.

He called her “Briar” again and again, his tone pleading, so laden with an emotion that she couldn’t call anything but grief. It got to the point where she’d have done anything to stop that feeling in him, because it tugged too readily on her own answering raw-edged hollowness, summoning too many demons that wanted to drag her down. She shut her own eyes for a moment, centering herself with determination.

“I’m here,” she said finally, putting a hand out and brushing sweat-damp black curls off his forehead. “I’m here, Haymitch. It’s OK.”

He let out a broken, convulsive sound that made her dive for the bucket at his bedside, though she realized it might have been a laugh or a sob as well. “M’sorry. All my fault. I didn’t think…I should have been there with you…”

“It wasn’t your fault. And you’ve always tried to look out for other people.” He obviously needed to hear it, because a shudder went through him at that, and he relaxed a little.

He kept trying to tell her things and she played along as best she could, but she was left with more questions than answers. He finally fell asleep, though, or passed out. Either way, the pain-racked lines of his body relaxed. 

“He kept calling me Briar,” she told Johanna when she came back. “You know who that is?”

“That’s his old girlfriend, the one Snow killed right after his Games. Along with his mom and his little brother.” Annie had only heard that story secondhand as a cautionary tale, but now it made sense. Johanna looked at Annie intently. “Your skin’s a little darker than his, but you’ve got the black hair, and I suppose he wasn’t really looking at your eye color.”

“Suppose not,” she said, tiredly stretching her aching back. “You’ve got him?” Johanna might need more time to steel herself to another round of it.

“Yeah. Go get some rest.” As she checked on Dylan and then lay down for a nap herself, she thought of Haymitch, still grieving after so many years, and feeling like he’d failed Briar in not being there. Heart aching, she knew how much he must have loved her, and how much she could relate to both the love and the grief. She also hoped for both his sake and Johanna's that it was the living woman sharing the house with him and caring for him in his illness, not the dead girl he mourned so desperately, that took pride of place in his heart. Maybe she even hoped it a little selfishly, thinking of Finnick's ghost and how he still filled her heart so completely that there was no room for any other man, and maybe there never could be.

~~~~~~~~~~

He knew from experience that the first days and weeks after finally waking up, clear-headed and kitten-weak, would be the worst. He’d be more or less useless until he got his strength back, but compared to the previous two attempts, he felt only mostly like shit. Whether that was just getting used to the ordeal, or if it was a reduced severity because this time he’d actually had people give a damn and try to care for him, he didn’t know.

Initially embarrassed to hear Annie had seen him like that, it faded when she brought up Briar. “So you know what it’s like,” she said, looking at him with something like relief in her pale green eyes.

“Yeah.” He knew more than he wanted to about grieving. So maybe he had something he could give her that Johanna couldn’t, and that was a reassuring thought. He wouldn’t be totally useless.

They teased him about getting his strength back, shoving food at him constantly. “Yeah, I know what this is about, you’re just after someone to reach high shelves and lift heavy things,” he said sarcastically, relieved his much-abused stomach accepted the bacon as he swallowed it, and that he even craved more of it. Suddenly his appetite roared to life with a vengeance and he couldn’t seem to stop eating, and once he started doing things and burning energy, that felt good enough too that he couldn't seem to stop it either. 

A few days later, Annie casually handed him Dylan while she was cleaning his crib. “Here, will you hold him?” The woman was naive enough to trust him with a baby? Didn’t she know how much he’d screwed up with other peoples’ children? The last baby he’d held was probably Ash, back when he was only four. Awkwardly, he tried to support the tiny, wobbly head, feeling like he was cradling an egg in his hands. But then it settled and it felt better. 

Looking down at Dylan’s face, red and scrunched as he made a few bewildered snuffling sounds and stared up at Haymitch in obvious confusion at who the hell was holding him and how it had ended up like this, he muttered, “You and me both, kid.”

Still, this was Finnick’s son, and slowly, as the days went on, he secretly came to enjoy those moments of holding the kid, a bright future untainted by the Capitol. Hearing Dylan laugh or babble happily when he was held, trusting Haymitch unquestioningly—so this was what it was like to be wanted and loved, so openly and honestly that it was like the bright near-pain of breathing in deep in the crisp winter air, but it was so clean and fresh that it was worth it anyway. Much as he grumbled and pretended it was a pain in the ass, sometimes when Annie or Johanna weren’t looking, he’d sing silly songs and make idiotic faces just to make that little boy laugh. And sometimes, definitely without either of them to hear, he would tell Dylan stories about his father. They were only good memories and funny stories, for now. Maybe Annie could tell them about the Four man she’d married, and something about the victor in the months of the year he was at home. But Haymitch had known the man Finnick Odair had been every summer. That had been a part of him as well, and someone ought to tell Dylan someday, but not yet. For now he’d treasure that childhood innocence and help protect it as fiercely as he could.

It wasn't always easy. The memories and the pain still encroached in, catching him off guard more easily now, and his instinct was to reach for a bottle to numb it all again. Some nights he wanted to drink so much he hurt with the longing for the blissful promise of feeling nothing, because it didn't matter that the war was over, that didn't mean that life couldn't still be painful or terrifying. But he'd promised Johanna he'd try his best. When he wavered, Johanna and Annie seemed to know it, and move to distract him until the moment passed. They reminded him in those moments of weakness that he wasn't alone, and the vivid reality of two living women chased away the dead neatly enough. It might have embarrassed him if he hadn't been so damn grateful to know that having seen his flaws, they stood by him anyway and made him theirs rather than judging. He was one of them now and they would all protect each other.

It went on until one night, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep after his usual trick of some reading to try to tire himself out enough to drop right off to sleep, he was shocked at the realization that for the first time in his adult life he was actually thinking about years ahead. There was some uncertainty there, particularly as regarded where things stood with Johanna, but strange to say, he was actually anticipating that future. It was such an alien emotion that he barely recognized the feeling at first: not the buoyant elation of happiness, but instead a steady sense of contentment, like the comfortable relief of a crackling fire slowly warming a cold-numbed body through. Curiously turning the notion over and over in his mind, examining it carefully, he couldn't find fault in it.

~~~~~~~~~~

The entire latter half of the year was always the period of hurricane risk, but they’d been lucky for a good while. No major hurricanes had struck the Four coast in Annie’s lifetime—there had been a few smaller ones, and the hotels on the beach where Capitol tourists wanted them for the view, without any storm protection, always suffered most, compared to the locals’ houses up on the bayou. She remembered when she was ten and her parents were terrified they’d lose the hotel that two generations had worked so many years in the cannery to help finance. They’d been fortunate that the damage was minor, and the Capitol always ponied up money readily to keep their favorite tourism playgrounds running.

But by mid-October, the worst storm risk was over, and they celebrated both that and the “official” end of the fishing season. In the Capitol days that meant the boats still scratching for whatever they could in the bay until the cycle turned and the fish and shrimp were in a more abundant season again, because they weren’t about to get several months off work. This year was different, though. The end of the season meant actually shutting down to help let the stocks recover—really, most of the boats had been tied up to the dock for most of the year. Four’s economy was shaky enough after decades of basing their fishing on Capitol demands rather than the realities of the fish. Paylor and Mayor Solange were still deciding what to do about the dual crashes of the fishing and the tourism, and surprisingly, Haymitch took up working with the mayor. Maybe not a big surprise, though, when she thought about it. He might not know fishing, but he could see the big scheme of things, and the general well-being seemed like a concern he’d easily adopt. It was a far way down to tumble from being one of the Capitol’s favored districts, but at least Paylor made sure they always had the things they needed. Nobody would starve, and Annie had faith that things would recover eventually.

Hard to tell that Four was in difficult straits right now, though, with people gathered together for the traditional fall _fais dodo_. Bright colored clothes, laughter, music, and people seemed determined to forget their new uncertainties, and make up for missing last year’s celebration, with a vengeance. Johanna sold out of her latest carvings and furniture quickly, furthering her business. Haymitch earned some approval with a catch of a nice, fat red drum to enter in the fishing contest. He had some skills in that area, muttering something about fishing for trout and catfish out in the woods as a kid. The fish that were caught were quickly dispatched into kitchens to help make up the potluck. 

Hearing the band, with the fiddle and the accordion, watching the dancers whirl and turn energetically, Annie smiled at Haymitch and said, “Well, you’re as good as our lady there with the fiddle.” She wouldn’t forget that he’d learned a few Four songs for her wedding, though remembering that day still felt like something broke inside of her, cutting like shards of glass.

Haymitch must have seen how stricken she was written on her face because he said, “Didn’t get to dance with you then because I was fiddlin’ away the whole afternoon.” He held a hand out. “Mind? You’ll have to show me how the hell you do this. It ain’t like Twelve dancing and I wasn’t paying attention then.”

Grateful for what he was doing, even as she recognized it she led him out into the square and started to teach him the steps. She suspected he was lying about not paying attention, or perhaps he was just that quick a study. But soon enough he had the way of it, and she let herself just think about the music and the instinctive motions of the reel.

It shocked her how good it felt to dance with him. Examining it, she couldn’t help but feel relief that it wasn’t any lovesick feeling for Haymitch himself. She felt good around him, but she didn’t want him in her bed. Besides, she knew he and Johanna had whatever unacknowledged thing developing—he’d danced with Johanna first. And if she could dance with any man, she still wanted Finnick first and nobody else. But just then it felt wonderful to be touched like this, to lean into the strength of a man’s embrace again with his hand in hers and his other arm around her, as she whirled and turned and in doing so, remind herself that she was still alive. 

The fact it was Haymitch and sex wouldn’t enter into it made it all the more comforting. He wouldn’t expect anything of it, wouldn’t make demands she couldn’t meet. She could just enjoy this small kernel of feeling opening inside her from within the hard shell of grief. For a little while, she felt like she caught up again and rejoined life in all its rhythms—fishing seasons, storm seasons, dancing, joy and grief, loss and gain—and that perhaps she could find her way to keep moving rather than standing frozen outside of it. 

Although when the dance stopped, flustered, she had the thought, _What am I doing?_ The last time she’d danced was at her wedding, and here she was laughing without a care while Finnick wasn’t here anymore to enjoy dancing or anything else. Guilt descended like hurricane rains, dark and drowning. She hurried away towards the house before she totally lost it, feeling it coming over her. She knew Haymitch, Johanna, or both would be coming after her, but with a quick glance she saw them dancing again and she hoped they wouldn’t notice for a while.

Upstairs in the nursery, she sat in the rocking chair with Dylan in her arms, crooning a lullaby to him, saying miserably, _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry_ over and over. Whether it was to Dylan for feeling like she was betraying his father, or to Finnick’s memory for the same reason, she didn’t know. Dylan looked up at her, and once again she saw his baby blue eyes now had a wash of green. Every time she saw that, she didn't know whether it would be Finnick's deep sea green or her own paler jade green, or some mix of both, and in what direction her hopes lay.

She could never look at Dylan without an acute reminder of what she'd lost. But for a moment she’d caught a glimpse of a life beyond Finnick, Finnick who’d been her everything, and right now the long and murky years of that vast future scared the hell out of her.

~~~~~~~~~~

One of the better things about the house in Victors’ Glade, so far as Johanna was concerned, had been the washer and dryer. Not worth twenty-three dead kids and some pieces of her soul and sanity, but given what the Capitol considered “compensation” for that, it had been one of the best parts of a pathetic lot. Though Haymitch had it worse—his washer and dryer cost fifty lives. Forty-seven in the arena and then three more back right after that in Twelve. In comparison Johanna thought she’d almost gotten a bargain.

But trying to shed the guilt of it, she had to admit in doing laundry with Annie, it was nice to just treat stains, throw clothes in, and be done with it with a few pressed buttons. With a child of two and a half months, there was always plenty of laundry, between shit, spit-up, and the like. She had no idea how her own family had managed. She remembered seeing her mom hunkered over a tin washboard with scraped knuckles, and skin reddened and irritated by the harshest grade of lye soap for laundering. 

Annie held up a pair of sad, formerly-white underwear with sagging elastic, faded to a dingy grey, and glanced at them curiously. “Mine,” Johanna said dryly, since it was obvious at a glance that they were made for someone with far more hip than Annie. Slender as she was, Dylan’s birth was rough on her.

“Does it strike you,” Annie said, throwing the underwear in the washer, “that after a year of wearing it, maybe we should just get some new underwear already? That old Thirteen stuff is looking pretty pathetic, and every wash day you and I have to sort yours and mine because they’re all the same.”

That was the difference between growing up Seven versus Four, Johanna supposed. Maybe in Four they could have replaced it when it merely got pathetic. In Seven, it only got replaced when it was broken beyond all hope of repair, and sometimes not even then.

“At least we can pick out Haymitch’s,” Johanna answered with a smirk, throwing a couple pairs of his undershorts in. He wouldn’t hear. He was busy on cooking duty today. Annie would inevitably sigh that he’d not used enough spice, but apparently she liked to practically burn her tongue off as some kind of challenge to herself.

Annie snickered. “Maybe something nice,” she went on, a wistful edge entering her tone. “Although it’s not like I have anyone to wear nice underwear for...” Hearing the tremor enter her voice and seeing how she stiffened, Johanna reached out and pressed her fingers to Annie’s wrist, trying to pull her out of it and halt the grief from feeding on itself. She looked at Johanna with a look of drowning hopelessness. “It’s his birthday tomorrow.”

She’d almost forgotten, but Annie was right. November 2nd tomorrow, and it was the first birthday Finnick hadn’t lived to see. When she thought about it, at this point last year Finnick had been in the Capitol already. Two weeks later, he was dead. But at that point, even if she didn’t have her husband with her on his birthday, Annie was a wife, and also pregnant with Dylan although she didn’t know it yet. Given the timing, maybe he’d been conceived on their wedding night, which seemed about as tragic as it could get—well, actually their final night together would have been worse. For all that she’d only known Finnick for about six weeks total between the two summers they’d fucked each other for comfort before Annie came into his life, Annie had him as her husband for only about six weeks as well. That thought was depressing as hell. “Do you want to celebrate, or do you want to keep it quiet?” she asked, seeing no point in beating around the bush.

“Quiet this year, I think,” Annie said, face in her hands and her words slightly muffled for it. “Maybe next year I can celebrate when I remember him. But I just…can’t.”

“Of course not.” She rubbed Annie’s shoulders, telling her with the pressure of that small human contact that she wasn’t alone and that this was reality, not the world inside her head. Finally, Annie’s body relaxed and the small choked sobs stopped. Best thing to do now that the crisis had peaked was change the subject and try to buck up Annie’s spirits. “So anyway, on the underwear thing? Fuck it, wear it for _you_. You’re more than just Dylan’s mom. And not like I’ve got anyone to wear it for either.” She swore Annie raised an eyebrow at that and quickly looked away. “Let’s just both get some, wear it, and feel good, huh?” She’d never really gotten to wear nice underwear. Corsets and thongs and skintight leather pants had been more of the wardrobe the Capitol imposed on her. “We’ve had little enough of that.”

Annie wasn’t a pure beauty, features too soft and rounded for it in contrast to her willowy body. But something in the way she smiled, the wholeheartedness and warmth of it, always made her radiant. Then her smile turned mischievous as the corners of her mouth curled even further. Johanna was relieved to see it. “Should we include Haymitch in this resolution?”

“He’s not exempt,” she agreed with a smirk, enjoying imagining it, and the two of them started giggling together like a pair of kindergartners on a playground, imagining surprising him with a gift of new undershorts.

“Silk?” Annie choked out, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, but they were tears of laughter now.

That hit her like a dash of cold water, and Johanna could never use that mental comparison lightly now. It had taken her the better part of three months, and careful coaxing from Annie and coaching from Aurelius, to be able to use the shower again, and it had to be steaming hot. Even now if the water suddenly went cool she flipped out a little. Being out in the rain was still a challenge. “No,” she said, the word a harsh sound torn from her throat. “Not silk. _They_ made him wear it.” She remembered his undershorts were dark blue silk on that day so long ago. She’d looked away while he undressed, awkward and nervous. But she remembered spying those blue silk undershorts that had been the last thing on the pile of his clothes—neatly folded on the chair, which she’d thought strange then, but perspective taught her later it wouldn’t be acceptable to rumple the Capitol’s “gifts” and ruin the desired image. Then there had been the gentle touch of his hand on her arm that told her he wasn’t going to just grab her, pin her, and hurt her. 

It wasn’t Haymitch himself, but she wanted as few reminders of that day as possible. Somehow she now had the feeling he felt the same. “Not silk,” Annie agreed soothingly, her hand on Johanna’s arm, just as Haymitch’s had been. Johanna felt how tense she was, looked down and saw that one of Annie’s dirty blouses was a crumpled mess in her hand.

“Just get him some colors or plaid or whatever. But a few that are something funny,” she said lightly. “Ones with little hearts or whatever.” 

That set them off again, loud and raucous enough that Haymitch poked his head in, grumbling, “What the hell’s so funny, you two? You woke him up.”

Hearing the aggravation in his tone and seeing he had a fussing Dylan clutched to his chest, Johanna said in an exaggerated whisper, “Sorry,” trying to not snicker again.

Annie reached out for Dylan. “I’ll go get him to sleep again.” Haymitch handed Dylan over only with reluctance, and Johanna watched as he gave the baby’s cheek a small bob with his finger, the trace of a smile on his face as he did so. Looking at the affection on Haymitch’s face and the black hair they both had, someone might have actually mistaken them for father and son. Annie must have been reading her mind because she told Haymitch as she passed him, “You’d be a good father yourself, you know.” She glanced at Johanna after she said it. 

She tried to not blush like a stupid teenager—what was Annie after? Deciding it was just validation of the opinion, she said with a sweeping gesture, “Oh, by all means, go have a dozen brilliant and sarcastic offspring of your own.” 

Haymitch gave an awkward grunt at that, not quite looking at her. “Gotta get back to the gumbo,” he muttered, turning back towards the kitchen.

~~~~~~~~~

“Sunny enough,” Haymitch remarked to Annie as they sat on the blanket, tipping his head back and enjoying the warmth of the sun beating down on them, “though usually picnic’s a summer thing, not a winter one, ain’t it? And here I’m wearing a sweatshirt.” His hands were jammed in the pockets of it. “But at least there’s no snow, I suppose.” His dubious tone made it obvious he actually missed the stuff. Annie never could abide it. What she’d seen on her Victory Tour, and in the Capitol the previous winter, made her never inclined to endure snow again in her life.

“Oh, it’ll get hotter,” Annie promised. He’d only come to Four on the tail end of summer. “You’ll get a real Four July next year.”

“Better than July 4th,” he neatly riposted, reminding her of the date of Reaping Day. “Though Paylor’s turning it into some other holiday, ain’t she?”

“Remembrance Day,” Annie replied. He really had been out of touch with things if he hadn’t heard that last year while he was still in Twelve. But given what a state he’d been in on his arrival, she wasn’t surprised to believe he’d shut himself away in his house and ignored the world. 

Hearing Haymitch’s low grumble of protest, she told him, “But at least the ocean’s right there for a swim to help you cool off then.” At least one of the three of them could withstand the ocean. Thinking better of it, she looked over at him and asked carefully, “Uh, _can_ you swim?” Katniss had been able to, even if her technique was fairly poor, but Peeta had been entirely helpless.

“Well enough,” he said. He glanced down at Dylan, curled up into a little armadillo-like ball around his stuffed bear. The trace of a smile was on his face again. Every time she saw it, tentative as it was, Annie thought he looked like a man who’d had the happiness driven out of him enough that he’d forgotten what it felt like to show it. But it was there all the same, and it was there more often, especially around Johanna. “Maybe you two will swim again someday,” he said carefully, and she sensed the quiet offer to work with her and Johanna on that. 

Appreciating it, she knew she had enough other things to deal with that she couldn’t ponder that just yet. Maybe next summer, though, and maybe Johanna would be ready too. They could talk about it and decide. She reached down and brushed a few of the baby-fine wisps of dark hair from Dylan’s forehead. Sound asleep, he didn’t even stir. 

“Well, maybe and maybe not. So I suppose when he’s older you’ll be the one to teach him, then,” she offered, careful to keep her voice casual but knowing already that he’d leap at the chance to feel useful. 

“Might be better finding someone local,” he disagreed with her, after hesitating for a few moments, pressing back against her in argument with his own urging for her to confront her fears, albeit gently. “You folk look like a lot of damn fish in that water, and me, I probably swim more like…I don’t know, a turtle.” Slow and clumsy, she supposed.

Just then the specter of Finnick seemed right between them. She burrowed the toes of her shoes into the sand, if for no other reason than to have something to do while she gathered her thoughts and struggled with the crushing sense of loss once again. It came less now, but every so often it hit her all over again just how many things Finnick would miss. Dylan’s first birthday would probably be almost unbearable, and there would be so many moments after that. It would be Dylan’s Uncle Haymitch, or other men, that would have to be there and teach him. “He loves you, though. Trusts you.” 

Silence met her words. She didn’t look over at him, didn’t have to look, though she heard the soft whirring as he fiddled with the reel of the surf pole they’d brought to the beach. Both he and Johanna proved surprisingly capable anglers—in Haymitch’s case, with that skill and his black hair and olive skin, the local folks said teasingly that if he didn’t talk so damn fast and if his eyes were green rather than grey, they’d have thought him Four-born. That was even more true now that the former sallow pallor to his skin from the drinking and apparently locking himself inside his house away from everyone had given way to a healthy, sun-bronzed complexion from sobriety and spending so much time outdoors.

Waiting patiently, seeing if he’d say something first, she looked at the cooler, with a fat flounder, three seatrout, and a sheepshead in it already. They’d eat well tonight. Most people in Four were catching a fish here and there for their kitchens rather than a commercial market—the limits were strict but at least they still had that option to help feed themselves rather than being entirely dependent on Paylor’s charity. She’d caught a huge black drum herself this morning but thrown it back. It was a big old female, the ones with the most eggs, so it was better that she go breed than become dinner. Chances were the meat would have been tough and wormy anyway, and nobody was that desperate yet. She hoped they wouldn't ever get to that state.

With Haymitch, it was no lack of returned feeling that kept his mouth shut. She’d seen him with Dylan enough to know that, and she’d seen Johanna acting like that too. They might be reticent on saying things, but for people who knew how to read them, it was loud and clear. They loved her, they loved her son, and as for each other, that was clear as day to her and had been for a while now. Smart as the two of them were, it had to be caution and fear rather than ignorance that had kept them apart this long. Seeing he had nothing further to say on the subject, now she did look at him as he idly doodled in the sand with a stick. Well, if he wanted her to face up to swimming, she had something to put on him in return. One of them had to make the first move, because her watching them nervously circling around and around it at an ever-fixed distance like an eternal carousel ride had gone on long enough. “It wouldn't bother me or anything, you know. You and Johanna.”

If she hadn’t been sure before, his quick exclamation of surprise and the guilty look confirmed it—he suddenly looked about ten years old and caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The way his eyes instinctively went to Johanna, a distant figure walking the sands of the beach collecting shells, said it all. She would have laughed at that except she knew it would be the wrong moment, too vulnerable for him. “Well,” he finally said, obviously a bit uncomfortable, “I figured we weren’t that obvious.”

“It’s not so bad,” she explained, searching for the words, “that I can’t be happy to see other people happy. You, of all people…” He’d lost someone too, back when he was even younger than her.

It didn’t surprise her he seemed to immediately follow her train of thought. “Different thing there, Annie. She wasn’t my wife. We didn’t have a kid.” 

“So she was just your little girlfriend and you’ve spent all this time alone because she didn’t matter? Really?” The words came out with a harshness that would have done Johanna proud, but she couldn’t seem to help it. _Tell me, Haymitch,_ she thought, fighting against the rising darkness in her mind and the tears that threatened to fall. _Tell me you loved her more than anything and you thought you’d die when you lost her because part of you died too. And that now, maybe you’ve found a way to keep going and feel alive again._

She felt his hand on her shoulder. When he did speak up, his words were gruff and hesitant, almost too soft to be heard above the murmur of the waves rolling in on the beach. “She was…well, we’d been together since that last fall. Knew already we’d get married when we turned eighteen and passed that last Reaping Day.”

She could barely imagine being fifteen and committed for life. Her first love back then had been a silly teenage romance—even if at the time it had meant everything to her, she saw all too clearly now how meaningless it had been against what she’d had with Finnick. “So young.”

“You married young in Twelve, Annie. Because you died young.” She noticed he used “you” rather than “we”, which said far too much. “Between her, and my ma and my brother…I spent that first year…did everything I could by day to keep my mind busy. But every night, when it sank in again, when I knew I was the only living thing in that house…I’d lie there just wishing I was dead too. If it hadn’t been for knowing I had to be there for those damn Games the next year, that there was nobody else for those two kids…”

“If it wasn’t for Dylan,” she answered him, her throat aching from holding back the tears. “But a kid needing you isn’t enough, you know?” She felt like a traitor admitting that, especially with Dylan asleep right beside her. How many times had she heard, _But at least you have his son_ from people? Dylan was a comfort, and he had kept her going some dark days because he was all she had left of Finnick, and he needed her. 

But being a parent—or a mentor—meant the support was all one-sided. She could take comfort in loving him and knowing she would keep him safe and happy, but Dylan couldn’t look after her in return. Without Johanna, and Haymitch later, there would have been nobody who looked after her, who did their best to make her laugh and be there when she couldn’t go on. That was good too, but now she was reaching the point where she felt the lonely nights, remembered the feel of a hand in hers, fingers touching her cheek, playful laughter at a chase down the beach. She still couldn’t imagine anyone but Finnick in those moments. That might be true for a long time yet. But the ache was there sometimes whereas before the grief drowned it entirely. At least she was surfacing. Maybe she’d soon start to tread water and keep her head above the waves. Maybe even someday she’d be out of the water and safe. 

“Yeah.”

“That’s why you left Twelve, isn’t it?” She had the feeling the relationship with Katniss and Peeta never could quite break out of the one-way street of mentor/mentee. They would always be his “kids”. They could never be his friends and equals, just like she and Finnick couldn’t have ever been with Mags. The state he’d been in when he came to Four said plenty. They hadn’t found a way to look after him.

“They didn’t even need me anymore,” he replied. “They’re grown enough that they’ll be fine with phone calls rather than me living next door. They need a fresh start. But more or less, yeah, and I figured I might do some good here with any luck.”

“You have.” Dylan had needed him, and she had too, just as she’d needed Johanna. He helped her in different ways than Johanna had, with how he looked at the world and dealt with things, and hopefully she likewise gave him something that Johanna couldn’t. Strong as she and Johanna had been together, it seemed like she, Johanna, and Haymitch had only gotten even better since he arrived. It was as if they’d found the missing piece so that anyone’s burdens never rested entirely on one person, and one who might not be best suited to bear them.

“Mm.” He sighed sharply, hand dropping from her shoulder, resting it on his knee. “At first, yeah, I couldn’t imagine ever loving anyone else the way I had her.” He spoke the words quickly, almost rambling in a hurry to get them out as if he couldn’t manage it without turning it into a singular rush. “But at the same time I knew I couldn’t risk being close to anyone, because I was Snow’s new favorite pet and they’d be in danger for loving me, and I wasn’t going to make anyone suffer on my account. Then, you know, after how much I fucked up everything, after what they turned me into, after what I turned myself into, it was also that I didn’t deserve…”

She might as well have been listening to Finnick back in their earliest days. She remembered him, wide-eyed and scared and desperate, telling her, _I don’t deserve this, you know._ The echo was right there, even if she was sure the self-loathing and the fear and shame went even deeper in Haymitch. She reached over and placed her hand lightly across his mouth, muffling his words. “You do,” she said simply after he fell silent. “She does. And she wants you.”

After she took her hand away, Haymitch eyed her, raising an eyebrow and saying defensively in a way that told her she’d hit the mark anyway, “Point was, don’t take me as your guidepost.” Then the aggrieved tone left his voice as he told her, “Don’t think it was just grief all along with me. So yeah, you’ll find someone again, and if I can manage it, damn straight you’ll have no trouble.” He cocked an eyebrow at her and gave her one of his wry smiles. “And no, you won’t have to take twenty-six years about it. I want to be able to dance at your wedding without a cane, OK?” 

“OK.” She couldn’t help but chuckle at that, even as she felt some of the tears rolling down her face, but that was a relief too. Laughing and crying all at once, she let him put an arm around her and pull her in against his shoulder while she soaked his shirt with snot and tears. It felt good to have him as a brother—she’d never had one. Maybe someday distant she could think about someone new, and her life would go on in all ways. But she had this family they’d made, her and Dylan and Johanna and Haymitch. That was what made each day bearable, and sometimes it even made it sweet.

~~~~~~~~~~

Johanna hadn’t known that citrus fruit was harvested in the winter, but Four’s first crop with the trees transported from Eleven to an area near Victors’ Bayou now brightened the bleaker winter days, and she’d admit one advantage of this place was the lack of snow, so even in the darkening days of December, people could still go have a picnic on the beach, albeit with their shoes on and a light jacket. So for the first time in her life, she had a New Year’s Eve without snow. _And without Snow._ She definitely missed one more than the other.

Annie had taken Dylan back to the house to nap as it was coming up on dusk, but she’d return soon enough to join them. “I miss the snow,” she told him, staring out across the hard, flat grey of the waves. “I miss the trees.” She couldn’t say that to Annie. It would sound far too ungrateful.

“Yeah, and the mountains,” he returned, “the smell of the valley in summer. How fresh it all was. Maybe it’s the heat but everything here smells so ripe all the time, you know?” The marshes had the smell of salt and mud and sulfur, and the cypress swamps had that thick dark organic smell in a way that almost assaulted the nose. _Ripe_ was a pretty good word for it. She thought about the clean scent of snow, the sharp tang of pine needles, the freshness of a breeze blowing through the branches, the sweet wood-char scent of freshly cut timber. Even the forests smelled different, crisp rather than dank.

She nodded, grateful that he didn’t judge, even felt the same. “It’s not that I want to leave, you know. I mean, Annie’s been good to us. And…” 

He laughed quietly. “Nope. Let’s face it. We’ve needed her more than she needed us. She could have taken care of the kid by herself.”

“Could have, but I like to think we’ve helped her.”

“Of course. But cards on the table here—neither you nor I could have made it out there alone. Not half as well as we have here. We’d get by, hell, like we always did, but…” 

“No.” They could acknowledge that fact without self-pity. What she’d made here was a new life, worth more than fond memories of Seven coupled with solitude. There was getting by, and there was actually living. “It’s just that…”

“Nothing to say we can’t at least go visit someday. They’ll get the travel up again soon enough. Ain’t like we’re legally confined to one district anymore.” _We?_ She looked over at him, startled by that, but secretly more than a little pleased.

Haymitch steadily peeled another orange with his pocketknife and handed her a section of it, and she bit into it, feeling the burst of sour-sweet flavor on her tongue, as he remarked idly, “Never even had an orange in my life until I was on that damn train on the way to the Quell.”

That said plenty about how dirt-poor he must have been, even for Twelve, and she answered, “Far too cold up there for oranges, so we never really had ‘em either, but lots of folks in Seven would have killed for apple trees for their wedding, or chestnuts—we had to plant willows and stuff instead, they even weren’t too big on birches and maples,” because those could be tapped for their sap, and it wouldn’t do to let people have any ready food source under their own control. She missed maple syrup too, come to think of it, or birch or hickory. Any of them would have been wonderful.

"That’s right—you plant trees in the backyard at your weddings," and he glanced down at the orange again, peeling off another section neatly and holding it out to her.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s about as original as forty years of tree costumes," she said dryly, licking the sticky orange juice off her fingers before she took the new slice, but it wasn’t the same at all because a newlywed’s planting was _theirs_ , not the Capitol’s bullshit.

He shrugged lightly, and as his fingers brushed hers as she took the orange, his eyes suddenly met hers: “Maybe someday you’d like some orange trees of your own?”

It was like that small touch sent a jolt of tingling awareness through her—not electricity, she thought with a somewhat panicked mental laugh—but it was more his words than anything. Was he getting at—fuck, he’d better not be teasing her. Or was she just assuming things like a stupid teenager? She decided to risk it, even as her heart felt like it was caught in her throat. “Maybe you’d like a nice toasted hunk of fishy bread someday?”

He gave a snort of derisive amusement at that and she instinctively flinched, wanting to lash out and hurt him in return. But as he spoke up her anger settled, because he wasn’t amused at her insinuation. “Oh, not the fish bread. We wouldn’t have toasted tesserae biscuits in Twelve. It had to be special bread—folk would save for _that_ , if nothing else.”

They sat there looking at each other, and she got the sense that both of them were waiting for something. It struck her that maybe he’d just said that he’d like to marry her someday—at least she thought he had, it hadn’t been anything so clear as an actual proposal—and he hadn’t even kissed her. She could imagine saying that and he’d probably snark with that knowing grin of his, _Never did like doing things one way just because people said it was so._

While she was still pondering that over, he leaned over, one hand down beside her hip for balance, and he kissed her. It was a careful kiss—not boyishly tentative or awkward, more of a clearly stated question that waited for her answer, a hint of wistfulness to it. He didn’t just plunge right into it.

She’d never really been kissed like that. With patrons, with Finnick, with Haymitch before this, with everyone, it had always been a kiss that was about fucking. He kissed her like he wanted to love her, and maybe that meant fucking her, but that wasn’t the only thing on his mind. It felt right, and she answered that question in turn, kissing him back. They weren’t ignorant schoolchildren though, so she dared push back a little, giving it a bit more urgency, seeing if he would follow. 

He did, and like playing a game of catch, he put it right back on her, taking another step. So they went, the intensity reciprocating and multiplying every time it passed back and forth between them, and the kiss getting hotter and more insistent. His hands raked through her hair. Hers clutched in his shirt. They kept shifting slightly, adjusting and striving as if to find the way to get just that little bit closer. 

She felt the rise of sensation in her, something stretching and unfolding from where it had been huddled up, like a hawk coming up from slumber and spreading its wings to take flight. It took her a moment to place it. She’d been a green girl the last time she felt something like this, and her restless, ignorant childish dreams were so different from the depth of feeling she had now. 

So this was desire, pure and unalloyed by desperation or rage or pain or the need to dominate a stupid horny Capitolite from a random club and then discard them in order to feel control again. It wasn’t always nightmares now that woke her in the still hours. Sometimes when she dreamed of sex it was hot and satisfying and even a bit rough. But sometimes she dreamed about sex like she’d never known, full of sweetness or laughter. But it was always Haymitch now, because it had turned from needing _someone_ to banish the loneliness to needing him, and not just in between the sheets. 

With him, maybe she could find the way for her life, in and out of bed, to be about hoping rather than just frantically coping. Coping was all she’d known, though. She pictured that hawk again—feathers ruffled ever so slightly, eyes bright and keen, coiled and tense, ready to spring into the air. A few people kept trained pet hawks in the Capitol. Eyes covered with leather hoods, legs bound with leather leashes, captive and docile until their masters chose to command them, recalled back by a whistle. _Leather._ They’d put her in leather and on a leash too, hadn’t they? Suddenly a sliver of fear wedged itself in her. Maybe she’d forgotten how to fly, if she’d ever really known. 

As a child she’d watched the hawks flying out in the woods. Aloft in a limitless blue sky above the piney mountains, riding the wind and answering to no master’s whims—they always seemed so lofty and free to her, compared to the busy and purposeful flight of all the other birds. This felt like freedom too, the desire within her seemingly replicating the lazy spirals and abrupt swoops and dives of that soaring hawk as it coiled tighter and tighter, centering in on its target. So she closed her eyes for just a moment, and told herself she’d fly, or fall in the attempt. 

It was only a matter of seconds, but it changed everything. Abruptly he broke off the kiss and she could have screamed as she felt like she came right back down to earth with a solid thump, but he muttered an apologetic, “Annie,” against her cheek. He let her go only reluctantly, his fingers brushing down her arms as if to prolong the contact between them until the very last possible moment. Johanna looked over her shoulder and saw Annie at the head of the boardwalk, a distant figure in a pale blue sweatshirt and jeans. 

“Good thing you spotted her,” she acknowledged, even as her body simmered still, thwarted and frustrated. 

He smiled slightly and said, “Give it another minute and I wouldn’t have been able to pay any attention to anything else.” She’d take that as a compliment.

“Dylan’s asleep?” Johanna asked Annie as she sat back down. 

“Out like a light,” Annie said. She tipped her head back for a moment, taking in a deep breath and obviously smelling the salt air with relish. She reached over and took Haymitch’s hand with her right, and Johanna’s with her left. The wedding band from Finnick still shone brightly on her finger. She squeezed their hands and smiled. “Happy New Year’s Eve, huh?” 

“We’re all a lot different than we were last year. So hopefully this New Year’s will be better than the last,” Haymitch acknowledged softly. Chances were he meant the whole picture—Annie pregnant and widowed, her and Haymitch still such a mess, and Snow facing his execution. Fucking bastard had taunted her at the last, to the point the next morning she’d been filled with enough hatred and conviction that his death wasn’t enough, that someone else had to still pay, to vote _yes_. It wasn’t her proudest moment. But she was with two people who loved her despite her flaws. Perhaps he’d also meant last New Year’s Eve in Snow’s bedroom, drunk and lonely and angry as they’d been. _Yeah. It’ll be different._ That kiss proved it well enough. The anticipation was there now. She just prayed he wouldn’t back down, after she’d felt that kind of feeling from him. 

“It’s been a pretty good year,” she acknowledged, seeing all the ways she’d changed, let herself emerge from the armor of rage and loss. There were three people that she loved now, and who loved her, and she counted herself lucky for that. “We’ll make next year even better.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Haymitch thought wryly now that he knew what the kids had felt like getting things interrupted while they were kissing and cuddling on the beach. At least he was lucky that it was only Annie that would have seen it, rather than cameras broadcasting it to the world. As was, it had been a near miss.

He spent until dinner worrying that the moment had passed and Johanna must have regained some sense, but the way she looked at him when Annie turned away, the quick flash of a smile on her face, told him that wasn’t the case.

Somehow he still felt like an idiot as he padded down the hall towards her room, curiously convinced he’d misread something, and yet he was drawn to go to her anyway. After that afternoon, after the way she kissed him back, it had cracked open something within him. He couldn't stuff the longing back down now that he'd let it out, and she'd fed it even more with how she'd responded to him. It seemed to have taken on a life of its own now, coursing through him. Dinner was tough enough, and the thought of every meal, every moment, pretending to her and to himself that he was simply her friend, would be too much. He couldn't do it, when everything within him seemed to now yearn towards her, with all the years and years of denying himself anything and everything by saying it was for the best proving to be no defense now against the sheer force of suppressed passion suddenly coming to life again. He couldn't pretend that away any more than he could fight his way up a raging river. No, after that kiss, and their cautious talk about the customs of marrying and whether they'd want that for their own someday, he couldn't lie to himself that there wasn't even any chance. So he had to know. He knocked lightly on her door, still feeling even more like an idiot for being there. She acknowledged his knock with, “Yeah, c’mon in.”

The moment he stepped in and closed the door behind him, not turning away from her all the while, it struck him anew with a pang of panic. What the hell was he even doing here? Staring at her, she looked back at him, seeming equally frozen and hesitant. Suddenly her lips twitched up in a smile. “Nice undershorts.”

He couldn’t resist a roll of his eyes at that—he was wearing the pair with the bright yellow smiley faces on them. “They go so well with my cheerful personality. And far be it from me to turn down a gift.” Even one obviously meant to tease him, though rather than feeling ganged up on by the two of them, the gentle humor had actually felt like them showing him a sense of belonging. Besides, he’d admit they were comfortable to wear.

Hesitating only slightly, she flipped back the covers then, scooting further to one side of the bed. Taking that as an invitation, he crossed the room, bare floorboards cool beneath his feet. Sliding in beside her, he pulled the covers back up. January in Four wasn’t nearly as bitter as it was in Twelve, but it was still chilly enough, and the several minutes he’d spent after getting out of his own bed, caught up debating and hesitating before finally knocking, meant that the pocket of warmth she’d created felt good. They lay there side by side, not touching and not looking at each other just yet. He stared at the ceiling like something was written on it. It seemed like neither of them knew how to make the first move unless it was fueled by sorrow or rage or booze and it just _happened_ ; no need to think, only react. 

This had to be different, clear desire simply for its own sake. But without the spur of something else to start things and carry it along, there was nothing but conscious decision and deliberate will to rely upon. That scared the shit out of him but he’d had enough of the flavor of desperation and simply coping when it came to sex. So he summoned what was left of his courage, reaching out slowly and touching her arm first, just the merest brush of his hand. 

When she didn’t protest that or stiffen up, he dared a little further, and further, until she rested in the crook of his arm, body drawn up against his side, her head pillowed on his shoulder. The soft wisps of her hair tickled his neck and cheek. His hand rested on her hip, touching bare skin where the soft fabric of her t-shirt had rucked up, and the silk of her underwear. At any moment he could just kiss her and rush ahead, and he knew that would settle it. But he felt like that would be failure, knowing they couldn’t just do this deliberately, they couldn’t just _mean it_. She settled down against him, burrowing a bit closer, and her hand settled on his chest, right over his heart.

It might have been five minutes or fifteen that they lay there quietly, not moving, just listening to the sound of each other breathe. She must have felt his heart beating, his heart in her hand in more than one way. 

He kissed the top of her head and suddenly the words came to him. “You told me once it wasn’t about what you wanted, but what you could have. You remember that?” He remembered all too clearly the seventeen-year-old girl staring at him, terrified but determined, and how he’d felt both admiration for her guts at acknowledging reality and shaping it as best she could with what limited options she had, and sorrow that the pitiful spectacle of turning to him was the best chance she had left, and for the fact it would all turn even more to shit for her soon.

She glanced up at him with a wry smile. “Fucking hell, do you ever forget _anything_?” 

“Sometimes I really wish I could,” he said dryly. “But it’s changed since you told me that. So…tell me what you want.”

“Uh, I think you know how to f—how to do this.”

“I know how to make you—make _anyone_ —come. That’s not the same,” he corrected her, regretting the sharpness in his tone but unable to help it. In all the years he’d been a whore, and even those early years when he was fucking Chantilly for comfort, it had never been about wanting. It was about making do, like Johanna said. Tilly had been as starved for comfort as him. It had never really been that leisurely. As for his patrons, he’d been expected to instinctively know, or figure out, how to please them. Having to ask what would please them meant shattering the illusion of him as the arrogant seducer. This wasn’t about making her come. He’d done that before. This was about pleasing _Johanna_ down to her heart and soul, not just a damn orgasm.

She fell silent, and her voice was soft and muffled into his t-shirt as she finally replied. “I don’t know. What,” her tone went fierce, “like you know what _you_ want?”

He had to think about it himself. True, he could wring some kind of physical pleasure out of just about any situation he’d ever been thrown in, meaningless and even shameful as being forced to feel pleasure during rape had become. And yeah, pretty much any man had the same hot spots, so to speak, but it was all in the refinements and the infinite variations and preferences. But all his adult life it had been about the desires of others, or just simply trying ferociously to hurry up and forget. Even so many years ago with Briar, it had been all so new, so overwhelming, that what little exploration they’d done had taught him only that he loved her touching him. There had been no time to really explore his own particular desires, and then he was just a whore. So now he was forty-two years old, had been fucked by more people than he could count, knew how to please all of them, and he really had no idea what he actually liked when it came to sex. So his smile was rueful, a little bit sheepish, as he was forced to admit, “No.”

“I want this, though,” she said, turning over, bracing her hands against the mattress on either side of him and propping herself up a bit, looking directly at him with an intense, unwavering gaze that had unnerved so many people. Not him—that was Johanna’s way and he wouldn’t change her. “I want _you_. I know that much.” 

In spite of himself he couldn’t help an idiotically unguarded smile, once the momentary feeling of being unable to breathe passed. _I want you._ So he wasn't simply what she could have, and that particular shadow of fear melted away. He couldn't resist reaching up to touch her hair, hand then cradling her cheek as she turned her face into his touch. “Likewise." That was a weak answer to something so profound, so he managed to say it in turn, "And I want you." He reveled in the grin that she didn't hide, and how it lit up her face with an expression like he'd given her the finest present she'd ever had. "So...I figure we can start there.” 

As he nuzzled her neck he realized his evening stubble must be rasping her skin. He muttered, “Sorry,” instinctively—his patrons never would have put up with that, always expected him hairless and smooth as a baby’s ass from the eyelashes down, and that had been how she'd seen him the one time. He doubted she'd paid enough attention in Thirteen or in Snow's bedroom to notice chest hair and all the rest of it.

“Nah,” she returned, as she laid her hand over his heart again. “I’m not them,” she reminded him.

She wasn’t. She could take the reality of him as she hadn’t before, when they were a burned-out whore and a scared kid, or in the dark, or drunk. She wanted him, this man with stubble and scars from his last couple patrons—the only ones left Snow could probably get to buy him still, the ones whose idea of fun usually involved using a knife on a man who’d shown talent with a blade in the arena. Snow hadn’t cared if those last few buyers ruined what had previously been valuable merchandise. When they hadn't bothered with Remake on the wounds to erase the scars, or even rapid healing, that was the end of everything. He got Snow's message loud and clear that he was now too worthless for the price of upkeep any longer. He couldn’t help a visceral shudder at the memory of those final nights.

“You’re here with me now,” Johanna said firmly, her hand a solid pressure against his chest calling him back to her. He somehow wasn't surprised that she handled it so confidently. After all, she bore her own scars, inside and out. He'd seen some of the marks from the Detention Center on her skin. He'd see them all tonight, but he'd shed no tears for it. He'd admire her strength instead, because she was a survivor, enduring it all and coming out perhaps a little bent but unbroken. She was a rare woman in how she'd found the ability to believe in good things in a way that wasn't ignorance or a simple easy-going nature. She felt things too passionately for that. Her believing in him, or anyone or anything, was a deliberate choice, and she threw herself into her decisions with a whole heart and all her will. She'd never been a coward, but that heart of hers had something in it now besides anger and fear. It was a mingling of courage and compassion that he loved, and that was worth far more than flawless beauty.

So he nodded in agreement, though he winced at something that had nothing to do with past nightmares. “Ah, shit, we have a problem.” This had never been a concern for him before. His entire sex life from year to year had been entirely contained in the month-long span of Capitol contraceptive injections every summer. They’d been lucky those two nights in Thirteen and the Capitol and dodged a bullet both times, but without the utter frenzy guiding them those times, there was no excuse tonight to be careless again. “Look, we can do plenty tonight, but I don’t want to risk a kid…” They hadn’t even talked about anything like that—the notion was still far too distant. He didn’t even know how he felt, but he knew he wasn’t ready for that right now. 

“Took care of it,” Johanna said smoothly. “I went to the clinic this afternoon.” She gave a smile that he could only call simultaneously pleased and shy. “I hoped that I’d need it tonight?”

Somehow it managed to both unnerve and please him that she knew him that well. “And if I disappointed you there?” _If I’m not the man you think I am, in this or anything else?_

She shrugged, turning onto her back. “Then I’d just get my period like clockwork for once. I didn’t see a downside. So are we done talking?”

He couldn’t help but laugh at her sheer flippancy and pragmatism. No, if he let her down, she could handle it and she could let him know it. It was a struggle trying to forget old habits, and to become lost in the moment rather than the defense of well-trained mindlessness. He’d managed to forget himself for a few minutes on the beach, startled out of his fear by the unexpected feeling of it all, but he’d had the evening to worry and fret and anticipate. It was all built up in his head now, so to kiss her, touch her, and _mean it_ , make it about the heart as well as the mind, wasn’t easy. He was thinking too fucking much, about every placement of his lips or his fingers, and the more he thought the worse it got—he could almost see her thinking furiously also, trying to break free of her own bars. Suddenly this thing of being in bed together was an obstacle that appeared insurmountable from its sheer weight—they could fail at it, and what then? “Well,” he said, looking over at her, propping himself up on an elbow. “Shit. How ‘bout we just try it and see what happens? Doesn’t have to be perfect. We’ve got time.”

Something in her face softened at that. _We’ve got time._ Strange to say, he actually began to believe that no matter what, this already was different. Tomorrow morning she’d be here in this bed with him, and tomorrow night they could try again, and the next and the next. If he spent a lifetime learning about what she liked, that would be a damn fine journey.

He wouldn’t claim that entirely broke the dam, but it eased the pressure. In the middle of things he found he was touching her face and stroking her hair in a way he never had with his patrons, leaning down to kiss her lips, her throat, her breasts, longing for _more_ and _closer_ rather than to keep as distant as he possibly could while still being as physically close as two people could be. Her hands gripped at his back, her strong arms and legs pulled him in closer, her fingers raked through his hair, and she kissed him back with equal urgency.

He dared to meet her eyes, wanting to look and see _her_ while he fucked her—no, as they fucked, no, as they made love—and she didn’t look away. The intimacy of that alone was almost too much for him, and then suddenly she broke eye contact, nuzzled his neck, and turned her face into the crook of his shoulder. It didn’t hit him with a pang of rejection, because she didn’t look away because she didn’t want to see the face of the man who was deep inside her body. It had simply been too much for her as well, and she was feeling this every bit as much as he was, and that was the thing that pushed him over the edge. Knowing it had been too fast, fighting the instinctive panic of feeling like he'd failed in some duty by not pleasing to the fullest and that it would lead to punishment, he promised to make it up to her. He must have promised it too quickly and she must have sensed his jangling nerves, because her fingers turned his face back towards her, prompting him to look at her. There was no impatience or judgment on her face, only the sweetest kind of understanding. "We’ve got time,” she reminded him. Then she grinned mischievously. "Though all right, I wouldn't _mind_ you making me come, you know."

"Oh, well, then I wouldn't _mind_ you hollering my name when I do it, now would I?" He stared at her, astonished that what had been a vague thought in the confusing jumble of half-formed and barely understood desires had escaped his lips like that. _Did I just say that?_ Apparently he had. "Only if you want," he hurried to reassure her, not wanting to make it seem like a demand, and maybe still a little embarrassed to boot. He'd never told that to a patron, much as he could have made them do it, because gentle domination had been his forte. But he'd never asked it of them, because every time they said his name he wanted to cringe. They didn't want _him_. All they'd wanted was to possess their fantasy of him.

The second time, they got a bit more daring, turning back the covers and risking the chill in the sheer need to see each other, fingers and lips and tongues sliding over each other’s bodies, slowly discovering what felt best. Conscious of how patrons had expected them to just figure it out, they tried to offer some guidance. It was still too much to openly say the words _I want_ and know what to say after it. But when something was particularly good, a _there_ or _yeah_ or _more_ did the trick, or taking hold of a hand and directly showing again just what had felt best. It wasn't perfect by any means. Moments of hesitation or outright fear at reminders of old, bad memories broke through sometimes. Patience was every bit as essential as passion, and maybe the ability to speak an awkwardly fearful _I can't_ or _No more like that, please_ and believe that it mattered, or to hear it and be gentle on the vulnerability of it, said more about the feeling between them. Fucking didn't need anything beyond a healthy pinch of lust. This asked far more of both of them, but they were learning. He was with her, and they had time. They'd have a lifetime now.

He’d given pleasure to his patrons as an obligation, and even with friends, it was more because he was too instinctively well-trained to not do it, and sometimes it was even a lesson. The pleasure to be had in giving pleasure, in watching and hearing her approach that edge and then go over, and knowing he’d caused it, was something of a surprise. It tugged on some wistful old memories of being young and utterly awestruck at how powerful he felt to cause something like that, but he didn’t feel a need to dwell on the past memories of Briar as he’d done for so long, faded yet treasured as the only times in his life he’d ever had someone touch him sexually and he felt it with his whole heart and not just his senses. He didn’t need that, not with the immediacy of Johanna right here.

It was a giddy feeling, fierce and wonderful, to start to enjoy this, and to have the right to want something and even to actually have it. _I want…I want_. He thought now that the hunger was there in him, it might never fully be satisfied, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

But it was hunger of a different sort struck well into the darkling hours of the night as they curled up together, warm and sleepily content. “I want…” he said with the dramatic air of someone about to make a profound statement, leaning over and kissing her again, “…some food. Damn, I’m hungry.” Never _starving_ , that was a word any Seam child couldn’t ever take lightly. Her own stomach rumbled just then which set them both laughing like a pair of idiots.

“It’d mean getting dressed,” she pointed out to him. “Going next door.” True, Annie’s house did have all the food.

“Maybe we’ll just make do until morning. Give me a few minutes here and I’ll do my best to give you a good distraction.” It must be well after midnight by now. _Happy New Year_. He could actually believe that, because this year looked like it held all the promise in the world.

~~~~~~~~~~

The two of them plopped down on the cedar porch swing next to Annie, one on either side, setting it to swaying to and fro as the chains gave a slight creak of protest at being set in motion. “We’re gonna get you to dance, you know,” Johanna said, giving Annie an impish smile, tucking one foot up underneath the skirt of her blue dress. Lucky color for Seven brides, so she’d told Annie.

Haymitch handed her a glass of lemonade, and she drank it, grateful for the tart-sweet relief of it in the brutal July heat. He’d long since opened his collar and removed his jacket, hanging it on the post of the porch steps. A small tab of blue silk poking out of the pocket of it told her at least he hadn’t lost his tie.

“It’s your day,” she answered. “Shouldn’t _you_ be the ones dancing, not Katniss and Peeta?” She nodded towards the two kids, here on their visit to Haymitch for the wedding.

“Too hot,” Johanna grumbled. “Besides, the neighbors are fine,” she waved a hand vaguely towards the people dancing in the square, “but you’re family.”

She looked at the two of them and wondered if she could have ever dreamed her life would turn out this way, and that her family would now consist of people from Seven and Twelve, and a bright, happy little boy who’d be a year old in a few weeks. She’d lost Finnick, and Mags, and Carrick, and her parents and sister. One didn’t replace the other. Things had simply transformed into something different, but they were no less sweet for that.

Different indeed, though. She would never have thought her son would be sung to sleep by Seven lullabies, or told stories from Twelve. But when she thought about it, the idea that Dylan would grow up as the product of a new, mingled world—Four and Seven and Twelve—didn’t make her feel like he was losing something by it. Oh, he was deprived of a father, but an aunt and uncle who adored him went a long way. He was loved, and would always be loved. The old world was gone, and while she grieved for those she loved, it seemed strangely right that things had changed enough that her child would grow up something entirely new.

There were some bittersweet memories of her own wedding day, but something had turned, enough so that the sweet outweighed the bitter. Her memories of Finnick now were like silver, cleaned of the dark spots, taken out regularly and lovingly polished until they shone anew. She wasn’t ready to let Finnick go yet by any means, but when she thought about him now, it was more with gratitude and love than with searing grief. Looking at her friends—her _family_ —made her think that maybe someday be like she'd been with Finnick, and like Johanna was today: a woman glowing with the joy of vowing herself to the man she loved. She could at least start to contemplate the concept of a future beyond Finnick without feeling the old shame or panic.

Haymitch set his lemonade on the table beside the swing. “We’ll be back before you know it,” he said. They were going to Seven and Twelve for their honeymoon. She suspected they were also looking to escape the worst of the summer heat. But given they’d mentioned they intended to pack up their old houses, deal with all their families’ old things, and that meant they were saying their own final goodbyes to the past. They were officially making Four their home and future. 

Finnick’s house on the Bayou still stood with all its things. Nobody had dared to touch it—Finnick’s celebrity, in death, loomed even larger than he had in life. Sometimes she wondered how Dylan would manage once he went to school and the questions began. But they’d deal with that when the time came. And she knew that when the time came that she could face cleaning out Finnick’s house and truly say goodbye to him, Haymitch and Johanna would be ready to help her, and support her.

Taking another sip of the lemonade, she said, “Well, don’t stay away too long. Dylan will miss you.”

“I know,” Johanna replied, arm slung over the back of the swing. She suddenly gave Annie what could only be described as a sheepish yet proud smile. “Maybe he’ll have a cousin before long?”

She glanced over at Haymitch for confirmation. “We’re trying,” he admitted, his own smile echoing Johanna’s. “Figured I ain’t getting any younger, and someone’s gotta put some faith in the world here.”

“Dylan would like that.” She couldn’t guarantee he’d ever have brothers or sisters, after all. “Wouldn’t mind being an auntie myself.” She could imagine that with pleasure.

“Never thought it’d end up like this.” 

Haymitch gave a small laugh, glancing towards his wife. “ _You_ never thought?”

She couldn’t help but smile at the wonder in them at the newness of it all. Not that it had always been easy the last six months, but she would admit they were discreet, or private, or both. It wasn’t like she’d walked in on them, though their living next door rather than in her house probably helped that. It also meant she wouldn’t have to hear the bedsprings and sounds of pleasure in the night. But even small moments she’d accidentally caught, like the two of them curled up together in the hammock, Haymitch’s arms around her waist and how Johanna leaned back into his embrace, hearing the sound of soft whispers and murmurs meant only for each others' ears, made her wistful, even as she felt the quiet pleasure of seeing two people that she loved so obviously happy for once in their lives. “I’m happy for you,” she said, feeling the need for them to hear it again. They both seemed to relax at that, as if once again, her reassurance assuaged a fear that their happiness somehow caused her misery.

“You’ve been good to us,” Johanna said finally. “How the hell you managed to take in two cast-offs—“

“Castaways, maybe,” she said lightly, “but not cast-offs.” They’d been adrift, that was all. They always had been inclined to judge themselves most harshly. 

Haymitch made a soft sound that she couldn’t quite place. “You know,” he said, words slow and measured at first, as if he was puzzling it out, and then increasing as he seemed to put pieces into place, “we all knew Finnick was her favorite, but it’s you that’s most like Mags, Annie. She tried to look after other victors as she could. Didn’t care if they weren’t Four. She just looked after them. Her and Woof were the ones that really made us something more than just a bunch of fucked-up killer children from all corners of Panem. She was a family-maker, was Mags.”

That seemed like a fitting eulogy for a woman that she’d loved as her own kin when Annie thought about it, though she thought Haymitch himself had more in common with Mags than he realized. “To Mags and Finnick,” Johanna said quietly, raising her glass.

“To everyone we lost along the way,” Haymitch followed her, his own voice a little unsteady at the memories, and tears prickled her eyes just for a moment at the kindness of their gesture.

There were so many dead, truly. But after racking her brains for a long minute, she said the only thing that seemed to fit. They’d endured the worst and maybe now the best of it was finally beginning. Looking in turn at the two of them, and then over to Dylan asleep in his cradle over on the other end of the porch, she raised her own glass and said simply, “To life.”


End file.
